Social Censure and Critical Criminology : After Sumner 978-1-349-95221-2, 1349952214, 978-1-349-95220-5

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xix
Thinking Through Critical Criminology (Paul Roberts)....Pages 1-45
Censure: Moral and Sociological (Lindsay Farmer)....Pages 47-65
Restoring the Crime-Poverty-Class Inequality Link (Colin Webster)....Pages 67-91
Two Accounts of Censure (Anthony Amatrudo)....Pages 93-114
Anti-racist Criminology? (Rod Earle)....Pages 115-138
The Social Censure of Hidden Youth in Hong Kong (Gloria Hongyee Chan, T. Wing Lo)....Pages 139-189
Sex Work, Censure and Transgression (Maggie O’Neill)....Pages 191-215
Mitigating and Responding to Corporate Violence: Beyond Crime and Criminology (Steve Tombs)....Pages 217-245
Idealism, Violence and Censure (James Hardie-Bick)....Pages 247-273
War and Peace: Is Militarisation the New Norm? (Karen Evans)....Pages 275-301
What Is Crime, What Is Deviance? Reflections on the Development and Contemporary Relevance of Sumner’s Notion of Social Censure (David Moxon)....Pages 303-331
Sensure? Public Art, Territorial Coding, and Censure (Ronnie Lippens)....Pages 333-350
Normativity and the Ontology of Being (Glyn Williams, Gruffudd Williams)....Pages 351-377

Citation preview

Social Censure and Critical Criminology After Sumner Edited by Anthony Amatrudo

Social Censure and Critical Criminology

Anthony Amatrudo Editor

Social Censure and Critical Criminology After Sumner

Editor Anthony Amatrudo Middlesex University London, UK

ISBN 978-1-349-95220-5 ISBN 978-1-349-95221-2  (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939109 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: zilli Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

For Colin Sumner—teacher, thinker, insurrectionist…

Preface

The first time, I set eyes on Colin Sumner was at an enrolment event for course options one afternoon in the old Institute of Criminology building in West Road Cambridge. All the staff had set out the aims and objectives for their courses in meticulous detail and took the students in the room through a series of PowerPoint presentations. Colin turned up a bit late dressed in a black roll-neck jumper, black trousers and black Chelsea boots. He was smoking a black Gitanes cigarette through a black cigarette holder. He certainly stood out from the rest of the teaching staff who stood before us in their shirts and ties and their understated Laura Ashley prints. He told the assembled room that he was not sure what he was teaching exactly but that he had just read a book and intended to build on that. Of course, I signed up and it proved a great choice. I was right to take his words as a sign of intellectual curiosity and not unpreparedness. Colin’s seminars were, by far and away, the most exacting, exciting and penetrating hours I ever spent in a classroom. Colin demanded a total immersion in the work and his seminars were very open-ended and often spilt over to the pub and the local curry restaurant where the theorising continued over poppadums and drinks. As a teacher Colin is a natural: he effortlessly gets the vii

viii     Preface

best from students. He never demands that anyone sign up to a party line only that after doing the necessary work that his students come to their own view. He is an intellectual of the front-rank and also a cosmopolitan having worked, at various times, in such places as Berkeley, Cambridge, Hamburg, Onati and Dar-es-Salaam. His enduring reputation rests largely upon two books—Reading Ideologies (1979) and The Sociology of Deviance: an Obituary (1994). These works are stunning not only in their penetration and intellectual rigour but also for their prose style. Colin remains the clearest of writers, elegantly and concisely making his points and always considering the aesthetics of the written form. He understands language and how it operates. I recall one morning wandering around Durham Cathedral with him some years ago. He halted by one of the ornate tombs and translated the inscription from the Latin, without drawing breath, and speculated on the impact that those words would have had politically in earlier times. For him, it was not so much an ornate tomb as it was an instrument of social control. This collection is the first to deal with Colin’s work in a single volume. Colin’s influence has been profound in terms of his impact on generations of students in Bristol, Cambridge, Salford, UEL and latterly Cork. His work continues to animate scholars as the continued interest in his output demonstrates. Reading Ideologies and The Sociology of Deviance: an Obituary are still read, re-read, and newly discovered by those looking for a more political and philosophically inclined take on crime and criminalisation. The contributors to this collection are drawn from Colin’s former colleagues, students, collaborators and academics who have been inspired by his writing. They have all engaged with Colin’s work and see it as of continuing relevance at a time when Criminology and socio-legal studies, more generally, have arrived at a crossroads. A great deal of contemporary Criminology is superficial, under-theorised and without much concern for political imagination or history. History weighs heavy on Colin’s shoulders and he stands out amongst contemporary criminologists in drawing upon many of the giants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Durkheim, Marx and Nietzsche, in his work as well as radical historians, such as E.P. Thompson. It has to be stated that Colin has never been all that clubbable but this has only meant he has never been beholden to a party

Preface     ix

line: his writing, accordingly, has a real sense of integrity. The essays in this volume take up much of what has been ignored or glossed over by others. This collection will be useful to anyone interested in understanding the operation of the law, and its processes, and to those thinking seriously about the ways in which history, and social structure, interject in, and through, the criminal justice system. It will convey something of the debts, and love, the contributors have for the man and his writing. Encino, Los Angeles California, USA Feast of the Holy Innocents December 2016

Anthony Amatrudo

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Larry Sherman for the generosity he has extended to me at the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge and to my many friends in the MPG at the Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches und internationales Strafrecht in Freiburg and the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte (MPIeR) in Frankfurt AM. Personal debts of friendship and inspiration are due to Blackheath RFC, Jake and Dinos Chapman, John Charvet, Magnus Ryan, George Steiner FBA and to the late Brian Barry FBA and Mike Presdee. 

Anthony Amatrudo

xi

Contents

Thinking Through Critical Criminology  1 Paul Roberts Censure: Moral and Sociological  47 Lindsay Farmer Restoring the Crime-Poverty-Class Inequality Link  67 Colin Webster Two Accounts of Censure  93 Anthony Amatrudo Anti-racist Criminology?  115 Rod Earle The Social Censure of Hidden Youth in Hong Kong  139 Gloria Hongyee Chan and T. Wing Lo

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xiv     Contents

Sex Work, Censure and Transgression  191 Maggie O’Neill Mitigating and Responding to Corporate Violence: Beyond Crime and Criminology  217 Steve Tombs Idealism, Violence and Censure  247 James Hardie-Bick War and Peace: Is Militarisation the New Norm?  275 Karen Evans What Is Crime, What Is Deviance? Reflections on the Development and Contemporary Relevance of Sumner’s Notion of Social Censure  303 David Moxon Sensure? Public Art, Territorial Coding, and Censure  333 Ronnie Lippens Normativity and the Ontology of Being  351 Glyn Williams and Gruffudd Williams

About the Editor

Anthony Amatrudo is currently Associate Professor of Criminology at Middlesex University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge and has been a Visiting Fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge and Cambridge and at the Max Planck Institutes for Law in Frankfurt and Freiburg and at the CEU in Budapest. He was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Nathanson Centre for Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security at Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto in 2012–2013. He is the author of ‘Criminology and Political Theory’ (Sage: 2009) and ‘Human Rights and the Criminal Justice System’ (Routledge: 2015). He was briefly Colin Sumner’s research assistant.

xv

List of Figures

Thinking Through Critical Criminology   Fig. 1 The eternal triangle of intellectual inquiry   4

The Social Censure of Hidden Youth in Hong Kong   Fig. 1 Theoretical framework   145 Fig. 2 Frequency of each label reported in the media   154 Fig. 3 Dominant ideologies reflected in the labels attached to hidden youth   155

xvii

List of Tables

Restoring the Crime-Poverty-Class Inequality Link  Table 1 UK welfare, work, and youth poverty 1980–2015 77

The Social Censure of Hidden Youth in Hong Kong   Table 1 Summary of news reports on hidden youth and negative social labels   151

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Thinking Through Critical Criminology Paul Roberts

Introduction: When We Were (More Sumner Than) Young The inclusion of my contribution to a volume on critical criminology might raise a few eyebrows, but it makes more sense within the context of a festschrift for Colin Sumner. As a masters student at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in the early 1990s, I encountered Colin in one of his most productive periods1 and, in particular, observed the evolution of what would shortly be presented to the world as his ‘respectful obituary’ for the sociology of deviance2 in its final performative drafts.3 Colin’s seminars on ‘History of Criminological Thought’ and ‘The Sociology of Deviance and Social Censure’, and their impromptu break-out sessions in The Granta, were consistently weekly highlights of that academic year. Participation in this celebratory project a quarter of

P. Roberts (*)  University of Nottingham, School of Law, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_1

1

2     P. Roberts

a century later enables me to reflect, with fondness and gratitude, on an intellectually formative experience. Although I no longer teach Criminology4 to undergraduates, and would not today hold myself out as a professional criminologist of any description, this essay is not an aimless amble down Memory Lane. Revisiting some old criminological haunts will open up questions of disciplinary constitution and interdisciplinary interfaces which, handin-hand with meta-theoretical reflection on these topics, have been recurrent themes in my published work in criminal jurisprudence,5 evidence and proof,6 international and comparative criminal justice7 and, lately, forensic science.8 Returning to some of the pioneering texts of British critical criminology, and thinking through their methodological (and ethical) implications, will demonstrate the continuing vitality and heuristic value of engaging with these influential ideas, irrespective of disciplinary politics. Thinking ‘through’, in the sense intended by my title, encompasses both analytical thinking about critical criminology as an object of (critical) inquiry and appreciative engagement with critical criminological thinking as a rich, varied and still vibrant set of intellectual resources. Before focussing specifically on ‘critical criminology’—an instance of what I will later be calling ‘adjectival criminologies’—there is scenesetting and path-clearing work to be done. The first part of this chapter begins by posing some existential questions for Criminology in general, leading to discussion of the institutional anchors of disciplinary formation and differentiation, and finally, to deeper exploration of the pivotal relationship (on my account) between Criminology and Criminal Justice. The second part of the chapter opens with a conceptual reappraisal of ‘critical’ criminology, before elucidating some of its principal theoretical virtues and methodological limitations, as I now perceive them. The first part of the essay closes with a fundamental question of disciplinary method and professional ethics that should be familiar to (critical) criminologists; the second part provides the critical resources to answer it, insofar as any satisfactory answers can be given.

Thinking Through Critical Criminology     3

Disciplining Criminology: Existential Questions What is Criminology? This is a question to which criminologists have often returned.9 It is also a question that many find irritating and unproductive, in part because it is by no means clear what kind of response should qualify as an answer. Certainly, no consensus emerges from previous discussions, and sceptics might doubt whether any real progress has ever been made by becoming entangled in such debates. This may be a general characteristic of all profound existential questions, disciplinary or otherwise. One is caught between the irrepressible human desire to wonder—What am I? For what am I? What will become of me? Do I even exist?—and the dawning realisation that there are probably no certain or entirely satisfactory answers to be had, at least if reason rather than faith is the measure of success. In relation to Criminology, the existential questions may seem unavailing, and ultimately pointless. Rather than worrying about what Criminology is, just do it! There would be a deep, tragic, irrationality in allowing searching self-scrutiny and reflection on the meaning of life (Criminology) to become a kind of paralysis sapping the will and stealing the time to live (or do criminological work). And yet, and yet… Following through this train of thought, and to the horror of more practically-minded colleagues who see their worst suspicions palpably materialising, questions of disciplinary constitution force second-order questions at the meta-theoretical level.10 In other words, for example, why do you want to know what Criminology is? To what end, and in service of which values, is such a question being posed and investigated? What difference, if any, would adopting alternative definitions have (‘in the real world’, if you must)? This is the stuff of Stanley Cohen’s ‘third order of reality’ involving ‘reflection about the nature of the whole enterprise itself ’.11 In thinking through such theoretical conundrums, I have found it useful to employ a device I call The Eternal Triangle of Intellectual Inquiry (ET).

4     P. Roberts

The Eternal Triangle of Intellectual Inquiry, Applied to Criminology Figure 1 presents ET in graphical form.

What? conceptual definition /subject matter

Why? motivations(s)

How? methods/methodology

Fig. 1  The eternal triangle of intellectual inquiry

ET comprises three ‘eternal’ questions. First, there is the question of subject-matter definition, often requiring conceptual clarification or elucidation. Simply put, what is the research project or inquiry about? Second, is the question of motivation. This concerns the justification for embarking upon any particular intellectual inquiry. Why is the proposed research question important or interesting? Answers to the question of motivation supply the rationale for selecting these particular research topics and questions from the virtually limitless universe of potential

Thinking Through Critical Criminology     5

alternative inquiries. Third, are questions of method and methodology. It is not enough only to know what the question is and why it is being posed; there is also the matter of means, that is, how the inquiry will be conducted. The significance of methodological possibilities and constraints is often underappreciated, relative to considerations of subject-matter and motivation. The overall point, and value, of ET is not simply to identify the three eternal questions, which could just as easily have been presented in a list, but to highlight their ‘triangular’ relationships with each other. Crucially, the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ dimensions of any intellectual inquiry are interdependent and their answers are mutually conditioning. None can be answered satisfactorily without providing collectively coherent answers to all three. The challenge is to bring all three points on ET—the what? the why? and the how? of any research project, inquiry or question—into mutually supportive and self-adjusting reflective equilibrium. ET immediately solves one apparent puzzle dogging theoretical reflection on the disciplinary constitution of Criminology. If definition is partly conditioned by motivation (and method), one should not expect to find general agreement even on basic questions of disciplinary constitution. To the contrary, definitions of ‘Criminology’ will, in part, reflect the purposes and interests of those doing the defining. We should, to elaborate, think of ‘a discipline’ such as Criminology12 as the outcome of an active, partly conscious and programmatic enterprise—discipline as active verb, rather than passive noun. There is nothing inherently wrong or unusual in any of this, so long as the processes of naming and claiming are transparent and disciplinary choices are intellectually and methodologically defensible. This conceptualisation necessarily relativises the value of disciplinary definitions. A definition of ‘Criminology’, in answer to ET’s subject-matter question, is not good or bad tout court, but only more or less functional or symbolically salient or ethically sound with respect to certain, specified or specifiable, objectives. One is led to adopt a pluralistic approach to disciplinary definition, but not without normative purchase. The ethical value, if any, of any particular disciplinary specification will reflect its intended objectives and uses, and possibly also its methods. As a characteristically modernist science with myriad practical applications, Criminology is intimately associated with ‘useful knowledge’,

6     P. Roberts

and—as is well known—not all of its specifications or applications in history have been either ethically neutral or socially progressive.13 The purpose and value of questioning Criminology’s identity can be brought into sharper focus through the lens of ET. Starting with the question of motivation, previous attempts to define or conceptualise ‘Criminology’ are replete with intellectual puzzles, over and above their number and variety. Tim Newburn suggests that ‘Criminology is a strange beast…. The study of the making of laws, the breaking of laws, and of society’s reaction to the breaking of laws’.14 This is not a bad starting point for further exploration and reflection, as far as it goes, but two, contradictory features of this characterisation are immediately apparent. First, it is extraordinarily broad, in encompassing topics— e.g. detailed studies of the legislative process, or doctrinal analysis of criminal law and procedure—that most scholars describing themselves as practising criminologists would not regard as part of Criminology. Secondly, it is too narrow, in specifying legalistic parameters which seemingly exclude topics generally regarded as falling squarely within the criminological canon—e.g. general studies of social deviancy, personality traits, public policy, social attitudes or crime in the media— that are not obviously or directly related to making or breaking laws. To stretch the definition to encompass every well-established sub-field or research tradition within contemporary Criminology, one would seemingly have to accommodate all aspects of modern life, and every dimension of policymaking and governance, in both the public and the private sphere—which is hardly any kind of serviceable definition or tractable programme. Criminology would be the study, or ‘science’,15 of all aspects of human existence. The observation, routinely attributed to David Downes,16 that Criminology is ‘a rendezvous subject’ is similarly suggestive and perplexing. It hints at a peculiar affinity or aspiration towards interdisciplinarity, without specifying what Criminology’s constituent elements might be, or why or how they come together. A crossroads may present enticing new directions of travel,17 but it is rarely a final, or especially desirable, destination. Criminology may be unusual, if not unique, in the breadth of its disciplinary scope and methodological pluralism; and this is one reason for criminologists to be concerned with meta-theoretical questions of

Thinking Through Critical Criminology     7

disciplinary constitution. Generalisations about Criminology are likely to be problematic at the very least, if not entirely incomprehensible, unless some effort is made to specify definitional parameters. Consider the claim that, ‘Academic criminology… is engaging with human rights, and in a wider range of areas and ways than ever before. But, to a remarkable degree… these engagements are characterised by the absence of—or disinterest in—enquiry into criminology’s history with rights discourse’.18 This thesis strikes me as a highly situated set of propositions, turning crucially on what one takes ‘academic criminology’ (and ‘human rights’) to mean. Certainly, large swathes of criminological research and publication, particularly those primarily concerned with the aetiology of offending behaviour and typically employing quantitative research methods, have little if any engagement with human rights. Rights discourse tends to be confined to those sub-parts of Criminology focussed on public policy-making, policing and penal process—the ‘reacting to crime’ panel of Newburn’s triptych. The extent to which this disciplinary subpart can legitimately stand in for ‘academic Criminology’ as a whole is a function of time and place. It is an extrapolation that would be more plausible in relation to British Criminology today,19 for example, than it would have been 50 or 100 years ago, or in relation to contemporary US Criminology. Conversely, some criminologists were addressing issues of rights and justice before ‘human rights’ became popular currency, even amongst legal scholars.20 There may then be an element of anachronism in looking for historical evidence of engagement with ‘human rights’ before that topic really existed in its modern sense as a tangibly recognisable object of inquiry. Finally, the further contention that ‘it is only by enquiring into its history that academic criminology can make sense of the choices about human rights it faces today’21 is puzzling on several levels. Granted that history (i.e. accumulated human experience) has much to teach posterity, the value of its lessons can be assessed only in relation to some specified purpose or objective. Historical knowledge might be intrinsically valuable, but a history of criminological engagement with human rights, if produced as its own reward, would more naturally be characterised as History of ideas and institutions rather than Criminology. It cannot be excluded that historical self-awareness might profitably inform Criminology’s

8     P. Roberts

meta-theoretical reflections on its own disciplinary constitution and activity, but it is not obvious why historical inquiry should merit any methodological priority over, say, conceptual analysis, normative speculation or sociological investigations of practical effects. And why should Criminology’s historical enlightenment be circumscribed by its own disciplinary engagement with human rights, rather than learning more comprehensively from general histories of human rights struggles, institutions and jurisprudence? In short, generalisations about Criminology are likely to be both true and false, deeply puzzling or tantamount to meaningless, without careful attention to definitional questions. This realisation places a premium on meta-theoretical awareness, not only for those who want to make general statements about Criminology but also for anybody interpreting or evaluating such statements. The price of meaningful assertion will often be diminished generality, the more so when one is speaking of ‘a polymath, hydra-headed discipline addressed to different audiences and diffusely focused’.22 What is true of Criminology in particular times and places is unlikely to be true of Criminology always and everywhere.

Institutional Discipline In addition to resolving intellectual puzzles, clarifying thought and facilitating meaningful communication, meta-theoretical questions of disciplinary constitution also have more programmatic and instrumental connotations. The project of disciplining Criminology is a particularised instance of disciplining academic disciplines in general. Academic disciplines are dynamic institutionalised intellectual constructs rather than static natural kinds. Academic disciplines and their sub-disciplinary taxonomies come and go in response to scientific innovation and in accordance with prevailing intellectual fashions. They emerge, evolve, grow, change, shrink and die, sometimes permanently (not too many alchemists or phrenologists around these days), sometimes only to reemerge with renewed vitality, as classical scholarship of all kinds did during and after the western European Enlightenment. Having read the

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last rites over the sociology of deviance, Sumner was still prepared to concede it a zombified afterlife.23 Disciplines are functional conduits of disciplinary knowledge in at least two important senses. First, disciplines organise knowledge according to intelligible schemas which enhance disciplinary knowledge’s accessibility, coherence and usefulness, and leverage its impact through effective interpretational and epistemic frameworks. Knowledge classified as ‘criminological’ is advertised as especially salient for criminologists, and is classified in this way precisely for that reason. Criminologists know where to look in the library, and which search terms to employ when interrogating digital databases, which academic journals to read, which professional association to join, and which conferences to attend, (at least partly) by reference to the sub-disciplinary taxonomies developed within criminological scholarship and the broader conceptual structures transcribing the contours of the discipline. Secondly, disciplines reproduce knowledge through institutionalisation, broadly conceived. University departments are configured, predominantly, along disciplinary lines. Teachers transmit disciplinary knowledge to students, some of whom graduate to higher level studies and, in time, become the next generation of researchers and teachers. Physical concentration (and nowadays, remotely connected networks) of like-minded scholars pursuing overlapping research agendas facilitates, through dialogue and collaboration, the production of specialist textbooks, innovative degree programmes, new journals and more academic conferences, reinforcing, enriching and entrenching existing disciplinary structures. Supply—of students, of teachers and researchers, of publications—expands to fill capacity, fuelling further expansion. Institutional scaffolding projects disciplinary knowledge into the future, enabling each successive generation of scholars to build upon and refine what has gone before without constantly having to retrace steps or reinvent the disciplinary wheel. At a time when the total sum of human knowledge is expanding with mind-boggling geometry, and the ability to mine, interrogate and utilise data is beginning to take priority over generating ever more data to the point of (mental and digital) saturation, the capacity of academic disciplines to organise knowledge effectively should not be underestimated

10     P. Roberts

as a practical virtue. Indeed, effective organisation might be regarded as a robust criterion for evaluating the quality of particular disciplinary frameworks. Of course, intensifying disciplinary specialisation in a world of exponentially increasing information poses the countervailing risk of downward spiral into disaggregated insular silos, of knowing more and more about less and less in ever decreasing circles. Stan Cohen confessed that ‘[f ]or those of us in the strange business of criminology… the problem of insulation has been endemic, chronic, and the subject of much rumination’.24 Meta-theoretical reflection on disciplinary constitution has another practical function at this juncture, in promoting interdisciplinary collaborations across conventional disciplinary boundaries. For such collaborations to be methodologically sound and mutually beneficial (and thus, plausibly sustainable), however, requires astute appreciation of disciplinary parameters and methodological commitments and careful attention to their effective trans-disciplinary integration. ET is offered up as a useful general heuristic to facilitate sensitive interdisciplinary engineering. Moreover, Criminology boasts exceptional potential for productive interdisciplinary collaboration, for example in relation to Genocide and Holocaust Studies,25 International Criminal Justice,26 War, Terrorism and Security27 and Forensic Science.28 By any tangible measure of disciplinary propagation and institutional entrenchment (e.g. numbers of students, scholars, journals, or publications populating the field), British Criminology has enjoyed several decades of sustained success. Whether this golden period of continuous expansion can be expected to continue into the future depends on a multitude of factors, prominently including UK higher education policy, the graduate jobs market, access to and integration within global networks of scholarship, and the sustainability of research grant funding, all of which will be agitated, possibly for a decade or more, by the unfathomable contingencies of Brexit. If the economy contracts, higher education will feel the pinch. As recent electoral history amply confirms, there are few votes in raising taxes to plug funding shortfalls in higher education, and this is hardly surprising once post-compulsory education has been ideologically repositioned as a privatised consumer good for which its primary beneficiaries—those consumers

Thinking Through Critical Criminology     11

of educational ‘experience’ formerly known as students—should be expected to stump up by way of down-payment on their own future prosperity. If there is any public money to spare for pre-election sweeteners, higher education will be found languishing low down on government departments’ wish-lists of funding priorities, alongside other electoral liabilities such as prisons and legal aid. Beyond economic considerations, erecting any further legal, institutional or cultural barriers to the free movement of ideas (which are enmeshed with and transmitted by the EU’s four headline ‘fundamental freedoms’ pertaining to goods, services, capital and labour) can never be a positive development for education or science, with their inherently borderless, universalistic, inclusive and unifying aspirations. On the positive side of the balance, it might be thought that Criminology is somewhat better placed to respond to current pressures within the higher education sector than, in particular, arts and humanities disciplines (encompassing the greater part of legal scholarship as traditionally conceived and conducted29). As a pre-eminently policy-relevant science, Criminology is relatively well-endowed with intellectual and practical resources to address the government’s ‘impact’ agenda,30 emphasising the instrumental value of scholarly research in ‘the real world’ beyond the academy. Concurrently, as a discipline closely associated with empirical research methodologies, Criminology is better adapted than humanistic scholarship to chase large research grants and develop international networks, partnerships and collaborations, all of which are increasingly being utilised as proxies for ‘quality’ in performance ‘metrics’, affecting funding and institutional reputation (which in turn drive student and staff recruitment and retention), and which are largely modelled on the methodological protocols, priorities and working practises of the ‘hard’ physical sciences. Especially in its quantitative, behavioural science and social psychology variations, Criminology is better able to play the game of maximising grant income, multi-author publications, bolstering citation indexes, and demonstrating global ‘reach and significance’31 than the single author, library-based scholarship typical of history, philosophy, languages or jurisprudence or even of mainstream, theoretically ambitious sociology.32

12     P. Roberts

To point out Criminology’s marginal disciplinary advantages in coping with REFs, TEFs, and the whole kit and caboodle of metricsobsessed bureaucratic audit to which British higher education is now subjected33 is not, however, to overlook the ever-present risks to any self-respecting science which hitches its wagon to the policy-making caravan. What kind of ‘science’ allows its research agenda to be dominated by instrumental, and predictably short-term, political priorities? What if those in power do not like the truths that methodologically rigorous research findings speak back to them? How can scholarship avoid, or insulate itself from, the corruption of evidence-based policymaking into ‘policy-based evidence-making’? These are not merely abstract worries in the recent annals of criminological research.34 Moreover, it is barely possible to calculate the longer-term damage that may be inflicted on the integrity of the research base and through the (possibly irreversible) erosion of academic collegiality across the sector by reductively market-driven approaches to teaching and scholarship. So far, we have been exploiting the potential of meta-theoretical reflection on disciplinary constitution, and employing ET, to elucidate the epistemic significance of organising and transmitting knowledge through institutionalised academic disciplines, to clarify the meaning of general statements within and about Criminology, and to assess Criminology’s disciplinary prospects against the backdrop of current UK educational policy and the broader political context. Recognising the active, programmatic nature of ‘disciplining’ disciplines opens up further opportunities for strategic deployment by criminological entrepreneurs, and for reflexive critical re-examination of such disciplineforming activity. From its self-conscious origins in nineteenth century scientific positivism, Criminology has been promoted, and sold to policymakers, as instrumentally useful knowledge. In later, more institutionally secure and self-confident phases, Criminology has expanded its horizons to offer advice and assistance, and strike up new interdisciplinary partnerships, in areas of contiguous and overlapping research interests with anthropologists, economists, historians, legal scholars, political scientists and psychologists, amongst others. I have previously argued for the necessity of criminological contributions to the fledgling discipline of International Criminal Justice.35 Revisiting a more elemental

Thinking Through Critical Criminology     13

relationship between Criminology and Criminal Justice, by way of conclusion to this first half of the discussion, will further illustrate both the epistemic and the programmatic dimensions of disciplining disciplines.

Criminology and Criminal Justice Is Criminal Justice a subpart of Criminology, one chapter in its compendious volume? Or is Criminal Justice a separate discipline, intersecting with Criminology without being subsumed by it? My impression is that British criminologists tend to assume the former relation. Their mental Venn diagram of disciplinary constitution imagines Criminal Justice as a small circle entirely encompassed within the much larger circle of Criminology, which simultaneously incorporates, as additional subsets, reasonably well-articulated, institutionally-rooted disciplinary sub-specialisms such as Penology and Victimology. The inclusion of topics such as ‘policing’, ‘criminal process’, ‘trials’, ‘sentencing’, ‘prisons’ and ‘the penal system’ in standard Criminology textbooks and reference works reinforces, what I take to be, a largely unselfconscious and theoretically lax, if mostly benign, disciplinary imperialism. Observing, uncontentiously, that Criminal Justice concerns itself with institutional responses to crime (recall the third panel of Newburn’s disciplinary triptych), criminologists easily presume that Criminal Justice must be, in disciplinary terms, ‘one of us’. Indeed, criminologists have been taken to task, from within their own ranks, for being ‘curiously unwilling to acknowledge th[e] fact’ that ‘much of what is done under the banner of criminology is in fact criminal justice’.36 Yet it strikes me that these kinds of observation are bedevilled by a terminological confusion, which by extension, and viewed in the light of ET, translates into a missed opportunity for smart disciplinary constitution. Terminological confusion can be traced to this central ambiguity: ‘Criminal Justice’ might refer to the institutions and practices of the criminal justice process, or it might refer to a distinctive normative ideal and consolidating value structure, for example an ideal of retributive or penal justice. Conceivably, references to ‘criminal justice’ might straddle both meanings; though it has to be said, and emphatically, that failure

14     P. Roberts

to distinguish – which and when, is when and which – is a pervasive source of confusion and theoretical incontinence and vacuity across this entire field of scholarship. Working predominantly within a social science paradigm, British criminologists tend to interpret ‘Criminal Justice’ sociologically, as referring to ‘the study of policing, probation, criminal process, the trial, sentencing, and punishment’.37 But a legal scholar or, even more so, a philosopher would more naturally associate ‘Criminal Justice’ with normative debates in moral and political philosophy centred on ‘justice’ as an organising ideal of human flourishing and peaceful coexistence, and with specifically penal applications stretching back (at least) to Homer and Plato.38 Modern Penology represents an interesting study in intellectual hybridity, because it undoubtedly incorporates philosophical speculation as well as sociological and socio-legal commentaries on penal process, though not—as I say— always in the most methodologically coherent or pellucid terms. Drawing the ‘semantic sting’39 from terminological confusions surrounding ‘Criminal Justice’ is a key insight of meta-theoretical reflection on Criminology’s disciplinary constitution; and possibly a job for life for enterprising theoreticians, given the frequency with which such terminological confusions arise and their apparent resilience to permanent correction. Beyond terminological clarification, at least two further methodological lessons may be drawn from this exercise. First, the normative dimensions of Criminal Justice have been a notably active field of scholarly research and publication over the preceding three decades, but this expanding corpus has been produced by, predominantly, legal theorists and philosophers under the banner of Criminal Law Theory or criminal jurisprudence,40 and largely outside the disciplinary parameters of Criminology as conventionally apprehended. Not badged as ‘Criminology’ and often appearing in specialist journals and book series, it is doubtful whether much of this normative criminal jurisprudence seeps into criminologists’ consciousness or makes it onto Criminology students’ or researchers’ reading-lists. This is a pertinent illustration of the cramped intellectual horizons and insularity to which disciplinary taxonomies are prone. Secondly, there is a tendency for criminologists working within an essentially descriptive, sociological paradigm to assert, or presuppose, normative positions that a philosopher would

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say must be ‘earned’ through competent normative argument. British Criminology, specifically, is characterised by a general inclination to be sociologically strong but normatively weak; albeit Penology, and in particular penal theory (insofar as this is plausibly categorised as Criminology), represents a partial exception.41 Here one should recall that not every judgement expressed, or tendentious claim advanced, by an academic expert is properly described as expert academic opinion. It is essentially for these reasons that I argued, many years ago, for characterising Criminology and Criminal Justice as essentially ‘distinct but overlapping’ disciplinary endeavours. This was my first pass at disciplinary taxonomy and differentiation: The fundamental, discipline-defining question for Criminology, I shall stipulate, is: ‘What is crime?’ Some criminologists understand themselves to be trying to answer a differently-framed question, namely ‘What causes crime?’. However, this second question is merely a derivative of the first, since to look for the causes of something one must have a conscious or at least implicit idea of what that something is—in this case, ‘crime’…. The enterprise of Criminal Justice, by contrast, is ultimately referable to a different foundational question, viz ‘What shall we do about crime?’, where ‘we’ is a placeholder for ‘the state’, ‘society’, ‘the community’, or some other relevant unit of social or political organisation. On this view, Criminology stands to Criminal Justice as action stands to reaction.42

The article in which this argument was originally advanced discussed complexities surrounding the action/reaction dynamic that it is not necessary to rehearse again here. Plainly, social reactions, both informal and official, partly define crime in the very act of responding to it. In retrospect, it was probably too narrow and reductive to stipulate ‘What is Crime?’ as Criminology’s definitive question, in the first place because criminologists, then as now, are concerned with a broader range of social and policy issues than is fairly represented by any preoccupation with the concept of ‘crime’; but also because this way of characterising Criminology credits criminologists with greater sensitivity to conceptual analysis than is sometimes merited. Nonetheless, the core of the original disciplinary taxonomy has withstood the test of time and further

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reflection, in ultimately resting on the motivational and, as I would now more strongly stress, methodological points of the Eternal Triangle: Criminology and Criminal justice have been differentiated, not by reference to distinct objects of inquiry, but in terms of distinctive disciplinary objectives. Criminology, as I have defined it, is an essentially descriptive enterprise. The answers it proposes to the question (I say) it is designed to address are ‘scientific’ reports produced from within the disciplinary paradigms of, in particular, Sociology, Economics, Politics, History, Biology, Psychology, Physiology and Neuroscience…. Where Criminology is descriptive, Criminal Justice is normative. Where criminological inquiry posed the question ‘what is crime?’, Criminal Justice asks ‘what should we do about it?’ The perspective is that of a system-insider—who could be a lawyer, a judge, a police officer or some other criminal justice professional, a researcher or any ordinary member of the public—who asks, or answers, a crime-related question of the appropriate form: What harms should be criminal offences? Should insane offenders be punished? Is provocation a good excuse? Who should go to gaol? How much punishment should be meted out to this offender? And so on…. [T]hese questions are raised by us, about us, and for us. They are a fractal of the supreme ethical question framed by Socrates: how shall we live? That being so, it should come as no surprise, on the view presented here, that Criminal Justice comprises a sub-part of moral and political philosophy.43

I hope that, in light of what has already been said, no reader will object that my disciplinary taxonomy is motivated by programmatic objectives. Of course it is! One lesson of ET is that there are no entirely innocent definitions of academic disciplines, only good—or bad— conceptualisations with respect to particularised objectives. Treating external description/internal prescription as the fault-line differentiating Criminology from Criminal Justice is intended to promote a more scrupulous, methodologically sound approach to matching up research questions and modes of inquiry with well-warranted inferential conclusions, in conducting one’s own research as well as in the consumption of research produced by others. For example, it is not generally appropriate to derive ‘ought’ (normative) conclusions from ‘is’ (descriptive) inquiries—an elementary (methodo)logical reasoning error known to

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philosophers as ‘the naturalistic fallacy’. In terms of effective disciplinary signposting, recognising that Criminal Justice is applied political morality should incline scholarship in Criminal Justice and its various possible subdivisions (e.g. policing, criminal procedure, criminal adjudication, criminal evidence, sentencing, etc.) towards productive engagement with philosophical literature, concepts and methods. One response to this argument has been that I am trying to steal away all the interesting questions from Criminology and leave its exponents toiling in the residual dross. Being boring is perhaps the criminologist’s ultimate bête noire and a fearful imprecation to cast around.44 However, there is nothing in my argument to imply the intellectual, methodological, ethical, or any other priority of normative over descriptive research questions or agendas. I am making a point about difference, not priority; which principally concerns research methods not professional identities. Whilst scholars are naturally entitled to present and associate themselves with whatever disciplinary traditions they choose, Criminology (and Criminal Justice) for the purposes of my disciplinary taxonomy are really just sets of tools in scholarship’s comprehensive methodological toolbox. Choosing a hammer or a saw as the best tool for the job in hand does not preclude the use of other tools for different jobs, much less does hammering or sawing turn you into a hammer or a saw (or even a joiner). In fact, many important research questions require both descriptive and normative inquiries and methods to produce methodologically competent answers. Armchair philosophising devoid of salient empirical facts can be just as intellectually deficient, not to mention politically dangerous, as sociological description masquerading as normative argument. In Against Criminology, published in 1988, Stan Cohen suggested that ‘[t]he great unwritten book in criminology is a serious examination of the basic principles of liberalism’, seeing as how: Criminology was born of post-Enlightenment liberalism, and every significant attempt to define its scope and purpose, every major twist in its convoluted inner dialogue, have been made within or in reaction to that original discourse.45

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‘This’, he promptly confessed, ‘is not such a book’. There are doubtless many reasons why that great book still remains unwritten, starting with the conceptual slipperiness and disputed morality of ‘liberalism’.46 But the arrested development of meta-theoretical reflection on disciplinary constitution may well be another factor. A few pages later Cohen proposes that ‘[t]he stuff of criminology consists of only three questions: Why are laws made? Why are they broken? What do we do or what should we do about this?’47 It is striking that a scholar as perceptive, learned and reflexive as Cohen apparently failed to notice that his discipline-defining questions number four, not three; and moreover, his ‘third’ question elides and thereby submerges the very methodological distinction between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ that I have suggested should be brought to the fore in demarcating Criminology from Criminal Justice. On my disciplinary taxonomy, well-known texts such as Ashworth and Redmayne’s Criminal Process48 and Sanders, Young and Burton’s Criminal Justice49 are appropriately classified as works of Criminal Justice rather than Criminology, not by identification with their authors’ disciplinary backgrounds50 or the closer association of these texts with law schools and law teaching than with social science departments, still less because their titles settle the issue. The hallmark of Criminal Justice scholarship is that it attempts to structure its descriptions of criminal proceedings within a normative framework of ideals and values, as both of these texts do, with varying degrees of theoretical ambition, intensity and persuasion. Let me stress that talking about norms, as sociologists have done since Durkheim, must not be confused with participating in normative theorising. Concepts such as legitimacy, for example, can be interpreted as social phenomena and investigated sociologically without taking any position on what actually is or is not legitimate, normatively speaking.51 This methodological stricture generalises to social constructionist, psychoanalytic, genealogical and historicist perspectives and approaches. Jurisprudential theorising has isolated normative statements ‘from a point of view’,52 i.e. statements containing a ‘thin ought’ expressed without deeper moral endorsement. For example, I can, in good faith, remind my observant friends that they ‘ought not’ to eat non-kosher food without myself endorsing or observing any such dietary restriction;

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we can intelligibly speak of the obligations imposed by long-dead normative systems such as Roman Law, etc. Criminology can, and does, engage with normativity in a descriptive sense without in any way compromising its credentials as (positivistic) social science. The question famously posed by Howard Becker to sociologists,53 then, is rather more pertinently addressed to Criminal Justice scholars engaged in committed normative theorising from the internal point of view: whose side are we on? If criminal justice scholarship is appropriately characterised as being, in some broad sense, continuous with the institutional practices it evaluates, its own legitimacy must be bound up with the legitimacy of those practices. The extent to which well-placed criticism of institutional practices carries over to associated Criminal Justice research, and to the scholars who produce it, then becomes a live, and possibly urgent, question for academic scholarship.

Adjectival Criminologies and ‘Critical’ Scholarship Contemporary criminological scholarship is awash with what might be described as ‘adjectival criminologies’, that is to say, strands of Criminology qualified by one or more adjectival descriptors. In this vein we have seen marxist (not to be confused with Marxian!) criminology, socialist criminology, working class criminology, conservative criminology, feminist criminology, alternative criminology, green (or environmental) criminology, southern criminology, peacemaking criminology, public criminology, administrative criminology, positivist criminology, left realist criminology, liberal criminology, neo-liberal criminology, postmodern criminology, cultural criminology, comparative criminology, international criminology—not forgetting the variation to which this chapter’s discussion now turns, critical criminology. The impetus towards qualifying ‘criminology’ with adjectives doubtless partly stems from the desire to provide more informative descriptions of research questions and programmes, given that the scope of research on crime, policing, criminal process and penal policy is potentially so vast and protean that any general definition of the field must be

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so abstract and bland as to be almost vacuous.54 There is also, it seems to me, a good deal of programmatic disciplining and scholarly entrepreneurship to be found in these descriptions. Sometimes, the aim is to promote Criminology in new(er) fields, such as war/peace studies or international relations, or to emphasise particular, possibly overlooked or underappreciated methodological approaches, such as comparative scholarship.55 Often, there is a desire to associate research with broader political or social programmes, as in feminist or socialist criminology. Many of the adjectives are self-descriptions, badges of honourable affiliation displayed with pride, but some are principally argumentative constructs applied to label, and distance and sometimes vilify, intellectual or political opponents, occasionally bordering on verbal abuse. These adjectival criminologies police academic boundaries by credentialising theoretical orthodoxy whilst ‘othering’ intellectual immaturity or heresy, an interesting and little commented upon instance of Sumner’s ‘social censures’ at the heart of the criminological enterprise itself. In addition to, or irrespective of, these grander ambitions, adjectival criminologies may reflect fascination with currently modish theories or theorists or represent attempts to extract some academic dividend from (self-proclaimed) novelty and innovation. The New Criminology56 set the tone in this regard, and has spawned many imitators and would-be successors. In a minority of instances, adjectival criminologies are lower-level explanatory constructs rather than entire schools of thought or broad theoretical perspectives, and derive whatever power and credibility they are able to muster from their own heuristic resources rather than piggybacking on wider associations. A good illustration would be Garland’s highly effective contrast between criminologies of the self and criminologies of the other.57 ‘Public criminology’ performs a similar analytic function in the more expansive ruminations of Loader and Sparks.58

What’s Really ‘Critical’ in Criminology How does ‘critical criminology’ fit into this disciplinary landscape? To begin with, we may note that ‘critical’ criminology tends to be an elective badge of honour, rather than an academic social censure deployed

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for purposes of strategic exclusionary othering. Critical is something that (some) criminologists want to be and to advertise themselves as, like membership of a fashionable club or academic fraternity/sorority.59 When Jock Young and colleagues decided to strike out on their own ‘realist’ path, it was ‘left idealism’ they explicitly rejected not, nota bene, the aspiration to be the authentic voice of the critical Left.60 Critical criminology has been a self-conscious adjectival variant of British Criminology since the mid-1970s,61 and it achieved a notable landmark of institutionalisation in 1990 with the creation of its own specialist academic periodical. Critical Criminology is the official journal of the American Society of Criminology Division on Critical Criminology, dedicated to exploring ‘social, political and economic justice from alternative perspectives, including anarchistic, cultural, feminist, integrative, Marxist, peace-making, postmodernist and left-realist criminology’.62 Feminist criminology is, to my knowledge, the only other adjectival criminology allied to broad social movements or political programmes63 to attain this marker of institutional recognition and continuity64; and feminist criminology is often regarded as another variant of critical criminology. If only certain criminologies are qualified as ‘critical’, others must be unqualified or disqualified. The adjective ‘critical’, the OED informs us,65 means ‘Given to judging; esp. given to adverse or unfavourable criticism; fault-finding, censorious’; or alternatively, ‘Involving or exercising careful judgement or observation; nice, exact, accurate, precise, punctual’ and ‘Occupied with or skilful in criticism’. To the extent that the latter qualities are suggested, it would seem that all careful scholarship should aspire to be critical, and that being uncritical would be a failure of methodological technique. In some areas and traditions of theorising, ‘critical’ means precisely that, and is best grasped as ‘an attitude and a willingness to continuously question and to be put into question’66 rather than subscription to any more substantive theoretical commitments or particular policy agendas. It has long been my view that ‘critical thinking’, also known as Philosophy, is just another way of characterising thinking done properly.67 Understood in this way, no serious scholar or researcher would want to be, or to describe themselves as, ‘uncritical’. Perhaps ‘non-critical’ would be a neutral and more accurate designation, though I have admittedly never heard anybody use it

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to differentiate criminological genres. These initial observations on linguistic usage call attention to the sheer brass-necked effrontery of proclaiming exclusivity in the ‘critical’ branding of one’s own scholarship, should anybody be tempted to do so. The first dictionary definition is suggestive of a prominent connection between self-consciously critical scholarship and opposition to the status quo. First-wave critical criminologists certainly regarded themselves as reacting against what they labelled (not always very transparently or helpfully) ‘orthodox criminology’, ‘traditional correctionally-oriented criminology’, ‘utilitarian criminology’, ‘Fabian criminology’, ‘exposé criminology’, and so forth.68 Although the ostensible project was for ‘a thoroughly critical criminology’ grounded in a ‘fully social’69 conception of criminality to sublimate and transcend its intellectual and institutional precursors, it might be more enlightening, in retrospect, to consider the ways in which the critique only properly makes sense in relation to its real and imagined targets and in light of the contextually-framed concerns of the day. Which is only to invoke the truism that ideas, intellectual trends and disciplinary reconfigurations are themselves socially and historically situated. Thus, as Stan Cohen ruefully reflected after 20 years’ existential struggle with professional identity,70 what began as a determinedly anti-Criminology was soon either largely absorbed into mainstream disciplinary debates or else rendered obsolete by changing social and political landscapes: ‘To be against criminology, it seems, one has to be part of it’.71 Commitment to historical authenticity, no less than professional good manners, demand that critics strive to avoid anachronism or trading on the wisdom of hindsight. The original critical criminologists knew nothing of the impending assault on the welfare state unleashed by neo-conservative economics in the 1980s, still less could they have anticipated the politics of global (in)security in a post-9/11 world. Our twenty-first century folk devils and moral panics look very different to theirs. Yet the challenge of sympathetically reimagining the intellectual habitus of times gone by should not be underestimated. Re-reading pioneering works of critical criminology from the 1970s, with their unselfconscious references to hippies, beat culture, bohemian lifestyles and the Women’s Liberation Movement, transports me

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back to a barely-remembered world of Starsky and Hutch (the original TV series, not the movie), Serpico, The Deer Hunter, and Town Bloody Hall. There is naturally no mention of ‘the second plane’72 or torture teams73 or fundamentalist terrorism; of paedophiles,74 sexting, revenge porn or trolling; of the surveillance society and the security state; of the appalling human tragedy and disturbing social and political fallout of late twentieth century genocides75 or twenty-first century wars. For readers much younger than me, I imagine the cultural milieu of Critical Criminology must be about as personally accessible as histories of the General Strike, or the Battle of Agincourt. Still, my sense is that, both intellectually and ethically, critical criminology needed its orthodox counterpart, just as Foucault should be read in dialogue with Marxism,76 and the inherited tradition of philosophical scepticism is parasitic on Plato’s mainstream legacy. For one thing, studying the critique divorced from its target is liable to convey exaggeration and over-reaction. For another, whilst negative criticism can be positively productive when it corrects subsisting errors, exposes corruption, agitates complacency or inspires social reform or self-improvement, left to feed only on itself, ‘adverse or unfavourable criticism, fault-finding, censorious[ness]’ can become an evil-tempered, half-blind old jackal gnawing off its own legs.

Politics and Morality Critical criminology positions itself in dialogue with the slightly older tradition of psychoanalytically-inspired Frankfurt School kritische Theorie; which is also name-checked by the OED’s entry for ‘critical’. This literature exerted some influence in critical criminology’s formative years (Sumner has a good line about the popularity of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, in spite of its rebarbative prose, being proof of the indomitability of the human spirit!).77 However, it is clear that Marxism and Marx (in that order) were the primary referents for critical criminologists trying to reconstruct a politically astute, ‘thoroughly materialist’ and ‘fully social theory of deviance’ committed to ‘socialist diversity’ and ‘the abolition of inequalities in wealth and power’.78

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Earlier iterations of Sumner’s account of social censures were presented as ‘a distinctively Marxist position’ rooted in ‘the dynamics of class formation, struggle, alliance and demise which reflect the development of the dominant mode of production’.79 Hard to believe now,80 but Marxism was all the theoretical rage way back then, so it is understandable that, having apprehended the necessity of interpreting crime and penality in social context, critical criminologists found themselves ‘forced, logically, to turn for such an analysis (and such a criminology) to Marx’.81 Subsequent history demonstrates, with impeccable irony, how this turning led up a blind alley. It is not only that energy was dissipated on pointless exegetical debates concerning the authentic authorial intent or ideological purity of this or that more or less obscure statement in Marx’s scattered, unsystematic musings on crime, law and judicial process.82 The credibility of this kind of knockabout has never really recovered from the ‘People’s Front of Judea’/‘Judean People’s Front’ sketches in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Nor is the problem only that the Marxist theoretical apparatus fuelled denunciation of ‘positivist’ criminologies as bourgeois science, in a way that choked off other legitimate avenues of inquiry and arguably retarded the development of specialist subfields such as forensic criminology.83 It is not even simply that Marx’s theory of history is evidently useless as predictive science, and for much the same reasons as Nostradamus’ prognostications, albeit at greater length and less entertainingly. Even if Determinism is true (and perhaps it isn’t), I think we can be fairly confident that the universe doesn’t dance to the tune of historical materialism or turn on the fulcrum of nineteenth century conceptions of social class. The more fundamental, methodological and intellectual objection to the Marxist turn in critical criminology is that it involves the sacrifice of scholarly judgement to ideological dogma, an elementary betrayal of genuinely critical thought. If ‘[a] precondition for a radical criminology is the separation of the essential from the inessential, the historically-specific from the historically-inevitable’,84 the project was—yes, inevitably— still-born. Critical criminologists have often taken their ‘orthodox’ counterparts to task for failing to address the political context of crime and punishment. Perhaps this connection was not as clear in criminologists’ minds

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in 1975 as it would be today, but it seems to me self-evident that criminality and the administration of criminal justice are thoroughly political processes, whatever else they are, and that criminalisation, both in conception and in actuality, is the outcome of political choices, institutions and culture. How else to explain the variability of concepts of crime and punishment through history and between different national jurisdictions? It should then hardly be considered a blinding revelation that hierarchies of ‘wealth, power and ideology’ will tend to be reflected ‘in the legal and moral discourses of the day’.85 Indeed, ‘the ideological and political character of moral censures is… open to view’.86 It is difficult to comprehend how criminologists could have overlooked these obvious sociological truths (to the extent that they did). The ancient conception of politics, as a discursive site of contested conceptions of justice centred on (in Rawls’ neat encapsulation) ‘the basic structure of society’,87 might have provided some useful guidance in this regard. Still, critical criminologists should be credited with popularising this realisation amongst subsequent generations of criminologists, to the point where it has become orthodox disciplinary common sense. Three further points are worth making. First, the development and implementation of criminal law and the administration of criminal justice are very complex activities requiring technical expertise of various sorts for their effective practical operation. Policymaking is mediated by the discretionary judgements of criminal justice professionals at every stage of the process. Whilst these myriad operational decisions are constrained by institutional structures and cultures, and they may well produce predictably patterned outcomes, the idea that criminal justice is some kind of bourgeois conspiracy cannot withstand reasonably detailed appraisal of the socio-legal facts. Perhaps policymakers wished they could exert that kind of hydraulic impact on process outcomes, and perhaps this has been achieved in some highly authoritarian societies. But it is simply not possible in open liberal societies, in which government policy is filtered through professional judgement and constrained by institutional values, some of which were explicitly adopted to curtail governmental power. Recognising the complexity and contingency of criminal process opens up a vast array of institutional practices and operational (‘discretionary’) decision-making to sociological inquiry and jurisprudential analysis.88

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Secondly, it is one thing to say that crime and penality are expressions of politics, another thing to claim that all criminologists should make this connection the fulcrum of their research programme. The range of legitimate research questions in Criminology is vast and diverse. For example, it is not necessary to analyse political economy in order to design better penal regimes for sex offenders or to assess whether criminalising drivers’ use of mobile phones improves road safety. These questions might not be especially interesting to many criminologists, but that hardly disqualifies them as policy-relevant science or turns them into objects of ridicule. Seasoned participants in academic conferences are well-acquainted with the tactic of ignoring the presenter’s paper and asking a question related to your own research instead. This is the tactic of changing the subject, and there may be more than faint echoes of it in the critical criminologist’s objection to ‘mainstream’ criminological research agendas. Nor is it legitimate to accuse colleagues of ‘overlooking’ or ‘ignoring’ certain issues or research questions when, in truth, they were simply never interested in them, or claiming to say anything about them, in the first place. Engaging with the politics of crime and justice should, in my view, open up new research questions and opportunities in the spirit of disciplinary pluralism and in accordance with a sensible division of academic labour. It should not be a criterion for regulating disciplinary membership or peremptorily disqualifying plausible research questions or methods well-suited to answering them. One needs to distinguish carefully between different strands of methodological critique. In particular, there is a world of difference between arguing that particular research questions or methods are categorically invalid on ideological grounds, and pointing out that particular research strategies are incompetent or deficient on their own terms, and therefore incapable of providing the right kind of information (‘data’) to answer the specified research questions or to support particularised inferential conclusions (‘research findings’). To the extent that causal explanations (aka ‘positivist social science’) rest on indefensible conceptual assumptions or parameters, deny their own theoretical preconditions, fall into a ‘fetishism of data’89 or abandon epistemic rigour—where they reach the ‘point at which positivism can be seen as the lazy option’90—criticism is surely well-warranted. Bad science is objectionable because it is bad, not

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because it is science.91 Moreover, it is central to Criminology’s mission to explain, and keep on repeating, to policymakers that faulty diagnosis is liable to produce disappointing, if not counterproductive and possibly even disastrous, policy prescriptions. Yet it is no less erroneous to mock basic tools of rationality, such as formal logic or algebra,92 to presuppose the automatic superiority of particularistic context over abstracted generalisation, or to apply a single set of criteria to judge the quality of all criminological research, irrespective of professed methods or objectives. If your only model of good Criminology is a fully social theory of deviance, you can be sure that the greater part of criminological research is going to fall short of that very ambitious and exacting (and skewed) standard. And if this is your principal basis for asserting that ‘[c]riminological research is replete with findings which range from the very unlikely to the ridiculous’,93 you had better be prepared to be petard-hoisted.94 My third point goes to the heart of critical criminology’s methodological protocols and presuppositions. I argued in the previous section that Criminology can usefully be conceptualised as a fundamentally descriptive enterprise, whereas Criminal Justice is essentially normative in orientation. Scholarship focusing on the politics of crime and punishment could be sociological description, or normative theorising, or some mixture of the two. To the extent that critical criminologists share Marx’s ambition to ‘change the world’, however, they are engaged in Criminal Justice (rather than Criminology) on my terms; and this implies a wholehearted engagement with normative philosophy. To be sure, one might try to pre-empt this conclusion through various theoretical manoeuvres, such as appealing, with the later Marx, to a supposedly ‘scientific’ historical materialism or travelling, with Nietzsche, to an aesthetic ‘beyond good and evil’. Neither of these theoretical gambits has a shred of credibility for anybody well-read in the history of ideas (or in twentieth-century political history, for that matter). What remains is normative philosophy, in which any substantial ethical position has to be earned through convincing rational argument. The same rationalist precept applies to sceptical or relativist meta-ethical propositions, which are sometimes elided to the ‘critical’, as it does to any positive normative contention. Scepticism and relativism are not default

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assumptions which somehow prevail whenever other arguments are found wanting, as philosophical arguments nearly always are in some dimension or degree. To the contrary, the positive case for sceptical or relativist conclusions is often the weakest of all plausible alternatives.95 When Criminology shades into Criminal Justice, normative philosophising is inescapable or research is methodologically inept. Partisanship is no substitute for normative argument, neither is intuitive moral outrage or the projection of unexamined subjective preferences. The process of criminalisation is ‘small-p’ political through and through, but the (normative) questions to which we require answers include: what conduct should be proscribed by criminal law? What should be the grounds of criminal responsibility and liability? How should criminal trials be conducted? How, and how much, should offenders be punished? Substituting other concepts, such as replacing ‘crime’ with ‘harm’,96 simply begs the question (to what extent should harm be the criterion of criminal prescription?) and defers the central normative issue (which set-backs to interests should qualify as ‘harms’ in the relevant sense?). Critical criminology, in short, frequently strays onto the methodological territory of Criminal Law Theory, where questions of criminalisation are keenly debated with growing theoretical sophistication.97 There may well be greater scope for productive dialogue and mutual instruction.98

Conclusions: Who’s Critical Now? This chapter began by revisiting some existential questions about the disciplinary constitution of Criminology. The first part of the discussion introduced a heuristic device, the Eternal Triangle of Intellectual Inquiry (ET), to facilitate meta-theoretical reflection on the institutional character, significance, and techniques of actively ‘disciplining’ Criminology as an academic discipline. Methodological considerations were central to this exposition, and were decisive in differentiating Criminology from Criminal Justice. The second half of the chapter extended this general discussion to critical criminology, characterised as one prominent variant of contemporary ‘adjectival criminologies’, which was then itself subjected to critical re-examination. Compressed

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into a single essay, the argument may appear less decisive, or respectful, than Sumner’s obituary for the sociology of deviance, but there is a parallelism of method in our thinking through, thinking about, and thinking with distinctive theoretical traditions. Learning is interactional, and always at some level biographical. This is no less true for entire academic disciplines than it is for individual scholars and researchers, and all of us are equally blessed and cursed with the task of ‘educating oneself in public’.99 There is a natural tendency to associate ideas with where we heard or read them first, rather than necessarily with who first entertained the thought or best expressed it. This realisation ought to stimulate wider, especially interdisciplinary reading, as well as perhaps a measure of diffidence and humility in the realisation that not everything that is fun to do is equally fun to watch or read about. The fact that crime is inherently political (in the broadest sense),100 or that any comprehensive explanation of offending behaviour must inevitably appeal to aspects of social structure as well as personal agency, are not unique insights of critical criminology, but critical criminologists have done much to popularise these disciplinary axioms. Likewise, although attention to ‘elite deviance’101 and the crimes of the powerful has been part of the criminological canon for over a century (Sutherland and Bonger feature alongside Lombroso and Durkheim in standard histories), critical criminologists since the 1970s have massively expanded the literature on these topics, both in scope and quantity.102 Even at 40 years’ distance, there is still much to admire, and even envy, in the excitement and élan of first-wave British critical criminology. Progressive in intent, socially tolerant by inclination and pluralistic in research methods, its pioneers advocated ‘re-examination of the ways in which… legal norms are constructed, their function, and the extent to which they are appropriate’103 and many scholars have subsequently taken up and developed these research agendas within and beyond academic Criminology. Critical criminologists simultaneously announced their intention to ‘encroach upon “academic” divisions’104 in order to claim the politics of crime as legitimate subject-matter for criminological inquiry. These methodological innovations have lost none of their salience or significance during the ensuing decades. In one sense, the successful popularisation of critical criminological themes has made much of the original project redundant: the fate

30     P. Roberts

of all radical thought, when vindicated because demonstrably correct, is to become subsumed and sublimated within the mainstream. It is easy to forget, when fully immersed in the sensual pleasures of positivismbashing, that Enlightenment figures such as Bentham, Kant, Newton and Galileo were once the radical, anti-establishment thinkers. As Jock Young himself asked, albeit rhetorically: ‘What after all is the point of talking about critical criminology if all criminology worth its name is critical?’.105 One might reasonably apprehend a healthy dose of good sense in a literal reading of that question, whilst still recognising the value of work being produced from within a self-consciously ‘critical’ tradition. Another major intellectual bequest to posterity of critical criminologists’ pioneering efforts is more in the nature of a cautionary tale, not least for adjectival criminologies of the present and the future. There is nothing inherently problematic in generating or utilising academic research within a personal or collective framework of political and ethical commitment. Indeed, in a way that those in thrall to a reductive—and currently, more’s the pity, imperialistic—conception of scientific objectivity will never fully appreciate, the absence of such ethical commitments in social science (or legal) scholarship may often represent more of a problem than ostensibly neutral, detached, ‘objective’ (as opposed to objective) stances.106 Political programmes may identify hitherto neglected issues and open up rewarding new avenues of inquiry for research, as, for example, feminist criminology has done with such conspicuous success since the 1970s.107 But all of this presupposes that knowledge in the service of politics is actually knowledge, and not merely a convenient projection of one’s ideological preferences. Good faith error is one thing, and may be excusable and corrigible. When it comes to the crunch, however, scholars must put scholarship before politics, or get out of the scholarship business. Because knowledge, expertise and sound judgement are the only qualities that separate professional criminologists (or legal scholars, etc.) from any self-opinionated celebrity or taxi-driver with an internet connection and a twitter feed. In a ‘post-truth’ world of segmented echo-chamber media and game show politicians, in which opinion-formers advise voters to ignore experts and trust their own intuitions, however uninformed or unexamined (think with your blood!), scholarship had better stand up for its

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own epistemological integrity, or history will not judge us kindly for our dereliction. Having reflected on some enduring lessons of critical criminological experience, my answer to Becker’s pointed question about the ethics of partisanship ought to be clear: the integrity of scholarship must be our lodestar. Some pockets of contemporary critical criminology still harbour the aspiration of speaking for alienated youth and marginalised populations.108 As a legal scholar, I wouldn’t myself claim to be speaking ‘for’ anybody (other than myself ), though I do take very seriously the methodological injunction that appreciative sociological research should endeavour to present the authentic voices of observed fieldwork communities and research interviewees. This precept, moreover, applies as much to the poor bloody infantry on the front-line of criminal justice administration as it does to the ‘nuts, sluts and preverts’109 of 1960s and 1970s radical criminology or the working class victims of criminal violence, discrimination and abuse rediscovered by left realist criminology in the 1980s and 1990s. Beyond that, if speaking truth to power sometimes feels like a hopelessly naïve and utopian disciplinary mission, we may have to settle for speaking as much truth as we can muster to anybody who will listen; since, when all is said and done, ‘[c]riminology’s job is to inform’.110

Notes 1. Colin Sumner (ed), Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (Open UP 1990), the first volume of the ‘New Directions in Criminology Series’ which Sumner edited, was published during my first term in Cambridge. 2. Colin Sumner, The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary (Open UP 1994). 3. See Paul Roberts, ‘From Deviance to Censure: A “New” Criminology for the Nineties’ (1996) 59 Modern Law Review 125. 4. Here and passim, when subject areas are capitalised as proper nouns, I refer to the organised academic discipline of that name. 5. Paul Roberts (ed), Theoretical Foundations of Criminal Trial Procedure (Ashgate 2014); Paul Roberts, ‘Groundwork for A Jurisprudence of

32     P. Roberts

Criminal Procedure’ in R A Duff and Stuart Green (eds), Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law (OUP 2011); Paul Roberts, ‘Penal Offence in Question: Some Reference Points for Interdisciplinary Conversation’ in Andrew Simester and Andrew von Hirsch (eds), Incivilities: Regulating Offensive Behaviour (Hart 2006). 6. Paul Roberts, ‘The Priority of Procedure and the Neglect of Evidence and Proof: Facing Facts in International Criminal Law’ (2015) 13 Journal of International Criminal Justice 479; Paul Roberts and Mike Redmayne (eds), Innovations in Evidence and Proof (Hart 2007); Paul Roberts, ‘Rethinking the Law of Evidence: A Twenty-first Century Agenda for Teaching and Research’ (2002) 55 Current Legal Problems 297. 7. Paul Roberts, ‘From Extradition to Surrender: EU Criminal Law and Comparative Legal Method’ (2014) 53 Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 547; Paul Roberts, ‘Comparative Criminal Justice Goes Global’ (2008) 28 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 369; Paul Roberts, ‘Comparative Law for International Criminal Justice’ in Esin Örücü and David Nelken (eds), Comparative Law—A Handbook (Hart 2007); Paul Roberts, ‘Restoration and Retribution in International Criminal Justice: An Exploratory Analysis’ in Andrew von Hirsch et al. (eds), Restorative Justice and Criminal Justice (Hart 2003). 8. Paul Roberts, ‘The New Interdisciplinary Forensic Science’ (2016) 43 Journal of Law and Society 647; Paul Roberts, ‘Renegotiating Forensic Cultures: Between Law, Science and Criminal Justice’ (2013) 44 Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 47. 9. Recently, see Mary Bosworth and Carolyn Hoyle (eds), What is Criminology? (OUP 2011). Also see Ian Loader and Richard Sparks, ‘Situating Criminology: On the Production and Consumption of Knowledge about Crime and Justice’ in Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan and Robert Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (OUP 5/e 2012); Kevin Carrington and Russell Hogg (eds), Critical Criminology: Issues, Debates, Challenges (Willan 2002); Simon Holdaway and Paul Rock (eds), Thinking About Criminology (UCL Press 1998). 10. For parallel debates in legal theory, see Paweł Banaś, Adam Dyrda and Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki (eds), Metaphilosophy of Law (Hart 2016).

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11. Stanley Cohen, Against Criminology (Transaction Books 1988) ix. Cohen characterised the first order of reality as ‘the “thing” itself (crime and the apparatus for its control)’; the second order being ‘research and speculation about this thing’. 12. Some prominent commentators deny that Criminology is a discipline. I can only say that they must be employing a more formal and exacting conception of disciplinarity than the more informal, functional understanding that I elucidate in this chapter. 13. Consider, for example, Criminology’s historical associations with eugenics, noted by Terence Morris, ‘British Criminology: 1935–1948’ (1988) 28 British Journal of Criminology 20, 26–27. As one early enthusiast put it, ‘the penal code is par excellence a group of eugenic measures… [a]nd following the results of eugenic science, it can tomorrow widen or narrow the circle of crimes in the end of conducing to the physical and psychic improvement of the race’: Giulio Q Battaglini, ‘Eugenics and the Criminal Law’ (1914) 5 Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 12, 15. 14. Tim Newburn, Criminology (Willan 2007), 4–5 (adopting the approach of Edwin Sutherland). 15. Let’s not get hung up on definitional quibbles about the meaning of ‘science’, not least because much of the perceived problem with that term is actually just a peculiarity of modern vernacular English. ‘Legal scientist’, ‘criminal scientist’, etc. sound odd in English, but are standard usage in many other (European) languages. Suffice it to say that my understanding is not naively empiricist, narrowly positivistic or in thrall to scientism. See further, Susan Haack, Defending Science— Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Prometheus Books 2003); Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (OUP 2006); Tom Sorrell, Scientism (Routledge 1994). 16. See e.g. Simon Holdaway and Paul Rock, ‘Thinking about Criminology: A Reflection on Theory within Criminology’ in Holdaway and Rock (eds), Thinking About Criminology (UCL Press 1998) 180; David Garland and Richard Sparks, ‘Criminology, Social Theory and the Challenge of Our Times’ in Garland and Sparks (eds), Criminology and Social Theory (OUP 2000) 7; Mary Bosworth and Carolyn Hoyle, ‘What Is Criminology? An Introduction’ in Bosworth and Hoyle (eds), What Is Criminology? (OUP 2011) 6. Cf

34     P. Roberts

Jock Young, ‘In Praise of Dangerous Thoughts’ (2003) 5 Punishment & Society 97 (rendering ‘rendezvous discipline’); Jean Hine, ‘Applied Criminology: Research, Policy and Practice’ in Brian Stout, Joe Yates and Brian Williams (eds), Applied Criminology (Sage 2008) 20 (ditto). The idiom is (mis)attributed to Lucia Zedner by Roger A Shiner, ‘Theorizing Criminal Law Reform’ (2009) 3 Criminal Law & Philosophy 167, 183. Whatever Downes actually said, or Rock says he said, I’m damned if I can find the original source. 17. Cf Kathleen Daly and Lisa Maher (eds), Criminology at the Crossroads: Feminist Readings in Crime and Justice (OUP 1988). 18. Thérèse Murphy and Noel Whitty, ‘Making History: Academic Criminology and Human Rights’ (2013) 53 British Journal of Criminology 568, 571. Thirty years earlier, Cohen remarked on (then) contemporary criminologists’ ‘sustained attempt to translate the human rights agenda into the creation of new criminal offences by the state against its citizens…. [T]hese are potentially powerful sources of criminalization, and to my knowledge, no criminologist has begun to study their history, social base, and possible effects’: Stanley Cohen, Against Criminology (Transaction Books 1988) 265, 266. 19. Murphy and Whitty, ‘Making History’, 568, concede in a footnote that their analysis ‘draws primarily on trends in UK academic criminology, but there is also reference to pertinent Australian, Canadian and US scholarship’. 20. Notably, Herman Schwendinger and Julia Schwendinger, ‘Defenders of Order or Guardians of Human Rights?’ in Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young (eds), Critical Criminology (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1975). There was also early criminological interest in aspects of international criminal justice that would today be characterised, inter alia, as human rights issues: see John Hagan and Scott Greer, ‘Making War Criminal’ (2002) 40 Criminology 231; Sheldon Glueck, ‘By What Tribunal Shall War Offenders Be Tried?’ (1943) 56 Harvard Law Review 1059. Now see, generally, Anthony Amatrudo and Leslie William Blake, Human Rights and the Criminal Justice System (Routledge 2014); Leanne Weber, Elaine Fishwick and Marinella Marmo (eds), The Routledge International Handbook of Criminology and Human Rights (Routledge 2017). 21. Murphy and Whitty, ‘Making History’, 569.

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22. Paul Rock, ‘The Public Faces of Public Criminology’ (2014) 14 Criminology & Criminal Justice 412. 23. ‘[E]ver respectful and gentle… who am I to dispute reincarnation, or the value of talking in words that don’t speak, or the value of talking to the dead, or the role of dead sciences in reactionary epochs in need of new justifications?’: Sumner, Obituary, ix, x. 24. Stanley Cohen, Against Criminology (Transaction Books 1988) 277. 25. Alex Alvarez, Genocidal Crimes (Routledge 2010); Joachim J Savelsberg, Crime and Human Rights: Criminology of Genocide and Atrocities (Sage 2010); L Edward Day and Margaret Vandiver, ‘Criminology and Genocide Studies: Notes on What Might Have Been and What Still Could Be’ (2000) 34 Crime, Law & Social Change 43; George S Yacoubian Jr, ‘The (In)significance of Genocidal Behaviour to the Discipline of Criminology’ (2000) 34 Crime, Law & Social Change 7. 26. Mark A Drumbl, Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law (CUP 2007); Wayne Morrison, Criminology, Civilisation and the New World Order (Cavendish 2006). Cf. Rob Watts, Judith Bessant and Richard Hil, International Criminology—A Critical Introduction (Routledge 2008). 27. Ruth Jamieson (ed), The Criminology of War (Routledge 2014); George P Fletcher, ‘The Law of War and its Pathologies’ (2007) 38 Columbia Human Rights Law Review 517; Steven R Ratner, ‘The Schizophrenias of International Criminal Law’ (1998) 33 Texas International Law Journal 237; Lucia Zedner and Benjamin Goold (eds), Crime and Security (Routledge 2006); Eugene McLaughlin, ‘Political Violence, Terrorism and States of Fear’, in John Muncie and Eugene McLaughlin (eds), The Problem of Crime (Sage 2/e 2001). 28. Andy Williams, Forensic Criminology (Routledge 2015); Christopher Lawless, Forensic Science: A Sociological Introduction (Routledge 2016). 29. Terry Hutchinson and Nigel Duncan, ‘Defining and Describing What We Do: Doctrinal Legal Research’ (2012) 17 Deakin Law Review 83. 30. See www.ref.ac.uk/, especially REF2014, Decisions on Assessing Research Impact, REF 01.2011 (March 2011): ‘[A]n explicit element to assess the impact of research… reflects policy aims… to maintain and improve the achievements of the higher education sector, both

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in undertaking excellent research and in building on this research to achieve demonstrable benefits to the wider economy and society’. 31. Ibid. To be rated ‘four star’ REF impact case studies must demonstrate ‘outstanding impacts in terms of their reach and significance’. 32. Cf. John Holmwood, ‘Sociology’s Misfortune: Disciplines, Interdisciplinarity and the Impact of Audit Culture’ (2010) 61 British Journal of Sociology 639, 646 (bemoaning the precariousness of critically reflexive Sociology and its gradual displacement by institutionally adaptive applied social sciences; ‘[t]hus, “sociologists” become “criminologists”, “social policy” analysts and the like’). 33. Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For? (Penguin 2012). 34. See Will McMahon (ed), Critical Thinking about the Uses of Research (CCJS 2008); Paddy Hillyard, Joe Sim, Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte, ‘Leaving a “Stain Upon the Silence”: Contemporary Criminology and the Politics of Dissent” (2004) 44 British Journal of Criminology 369. ‘The discernible shift away from Home Office funding’, Zedner et al. suggest, ‘is perhaps indicative of a fear of being pushed too far down the road of policy-led research towards projects that may, in any case, be hidden on a high shelf in government if the findings do not meet with the approval of whichever Justice Secretary holds the power on the day of publication’: Lucia Zedner, Carolyn Hoyle, and Mary Bosworth, ‘Introduction’ in Mary Bosworth, Carolyn Hoyle, and Lucia Zedner (eds), Changing Contours of Criminal Justice (OUP 2016) xxiii. 35. Paul Roberts and Nesam McMillan, ‘For Criminology in International Criminal Justice’ (2003) 1 Journal of International Criminal Justice 315. To similar effect, see Mark A Drumbl, ‘Towards a Criminology of International Crime’ (2003) 19 Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution 263. 36. Lucia Zedner, Carolyn Hoyle, and Mary Bosworth, ‘Introduction’ in Mary Bosworth, Carolyn Hoyle, and Lucia Zedner (eds), Changing Contours of Criminal Justice (OUP 2016) xxii. 37. Ibid. This discussion is later linked to ‘[t]he question of how any social science discipline develops and changes’: ibid xxvi (emphasis supplied). 38. See Trevor J Saunders, Plato’s Penal Code: Tradition, Controversy, and Reform in Greek Penology (OUP 1994). 39. Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Fontana 1986) 45-6.

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40. For entry points into a burgeoning literature, see RA Duff and Stuart P Green (eds), Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law (OUP 2011); Douglas Husak, The Philosophy of Criminal Law (OUP 2010); George P Fletcher (ed), New Voices in Criminal Theory (1998) 1 Buffalo Criminal Law Review Special Issue. 41. Penology and Criminal Law Theory have shared ancestry, notably HLA Hart, Punishment and Responsibility (OUP 1968; 2nd edn, Gardner ed 2008); and Herbert L Packer, The Limits of the Criminal Sanction (Stanford UP 1969). 42. Paul Roberts, ‘On the Preconditions and Possibilities of Criminal Law Theory’ (1998) 11 South African Journal of Criminal Justice 285, 293. 43. Ibid 296-7. The original footnote elucidated: ‘It is not a trivial question, Socrates said: what we are talking about is how one should live’: Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Fontana 1985) 1. 44. Cf Jeff Ferrell, ‘Boredom, Crime and Criminology’ (2004) 8 Theoretical Criminology 287, 295: ‘[T]he evolution of modern criminology has produced a stale commonality of boredom between its practitioners, its students and its prisoners…. As a result, the majority of mainstream criminological scholarship today can only be described as…. boring’. 45. Stanley Cohen, Against Criminology (Transaction Books 1988) x. 46. A sense of the astonishing breadth of scholarship claiming to describe, or to denounce, ‘liberalism’ might be gleaned by comparing Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Allen Lane 2014) with Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism (Penguin 2009). And cf Stanley Fish, ‘Liberalism Doesn’t Exist’ [1987] Duke Law Journal 997. 47. Stanley Cohen, Against Criminology (Transaction Books 1988) 9. 48. Andrew Ashworth and Mike Redmayne, The Criminal Process (OUP 4/e 2010). 49. Andrew Sanders, Richard Young and Mandy Burton, Criminal Justice (OUP 4/e 2010). 50. Cf Andrew Ashworth, ‘Criminal Justice, Not Criminology?’ in Mary Bosworth and Carolyn Hoyle (eds), What Is Criminology? (OUP 2011) (‘When I am asked whether I am a criminologist, I always say no…. I would not want to pretend to be a criminologist when I am not one’).

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51. See e.g. Mike Hough, Jonathan Jackson, Ben Bradford, Andy Myhill and Paul Quinton, ‘Procedural Justice, Trust, and Institutional Legitimacy’ (2010) 4 Policing 203. 52. Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law (OUP 2/e 2009) 140–143, 306– 308. 53. Howard S Becker, ‘Whose Side Are We On?’ (1967) 14 Social Problems 239. 54. Terms such as ‘total social fact’ (David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society (OUP 1990) 287) or ‘social ordering practice’ (Nicola Lacey, ‘Introduction: Making Sense of Criminal Justice’ in Nicola Lacey (ed), A Reader on Criminal Justice (OUP 1994) 28) purchase accuracy at some cost to clarity and illumination. 55. A tradition pioneered by Hermann Mannheim, Comparative Criminology (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1965). Now see, Katja Franko Aas, Globalization and Crime (Sage 2/e 2013); David Nelken (ed), Comparative Criminal Justice and Globalization (Ashgate 2011); David Nelken, Comparative Criminal Justice (Sage 2010); James Sheptycki and Ali Wardak (eds), Transnational and Comparative Criminology (Glasshouse Press 2005); Paul Roberts, ‘On Method: The Ascent of Comparative Criminal Justice’ (2002) 22 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 539; Vincenzo Ruggiero, Nigel South and Ian Taylor (eds), The New European Criminology: Crime and Social Order in Europe (Routledge 1998); Lucia Zedner, ‘Comparative Research in Criminal Justice’ in Lesley Noaks, Mike Maguire and Mike Levi (eds), Contemporary Issues in Criminology (University of Wales Press 1995). 56. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1973). 57. David Garland, ‘The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society’ (1996) 36 British Journal of Criminology 445. 58. Ian Loader and Richard Sparks, Public Criminology? (Routledge 2011). 59. Cf Mark Kelman’s depiction of the origins of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) as a loose coalition of scholars ‘who have identified themselves with this organization (come to meetings, put themselves on a mailing list, engaged heavily in the incestuous mutual citation practices towards which “schools” of academic lawyers tend)…. Yet it was still a fair question whether anyone knew what “critical legal studies”

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meant’: Mark Kelman, A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (Harvard UP 1987) 2. 60. Jock Young, ‘Incessant Chatter: Recent Paradigms in Criminology’ in Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan and Robert Reiner (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (OUP 1/e 1994); Jock Young and Roger Matthews (eds), Rethinking Criminology: The Realist Debate (Sage 1992); Ian Taylor, Crime in Context: A Critical Criminology of Market Societies (Polity 1999). 61. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young (eds), Critical Criminology (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1975). 62. http://link.springer.com/journal/10612. 63. I am not overlooking Theoretical Criminology, of which Colin Sumner was a founding co-editor. However, the porosity, if not complete incontinence, of the concept of ‘theory’ together with Theoretical Criminology’s inclusive mandate to ‘create an international forum for the advancement of the theoretical aspects of criminology’ embracing ‘scholarship from all the disciplines which currently constitute criminology, notably sociology, history, anthropology, law, politics, psychology, jurisprudence, philosophy, psychiatry, economics, geography and development studies’ (Piers Beirne and Colin Sumner, ‘Editorial Statement’ (1997) 1 Theoretical Criminology 5) resist categorisation as a distinctive adjectival strand. Theorising must be integral to any truly scholarly activity; but ‘theory’ is not necessarily ‘critical’ in the conventional sense. In short, Theoretical Criminology was always selfconsciously pluralistic and engaged with the disciplinary mainstream, as its founding editors stressed, ibid 10: ‘We are interested in any theoretical analysis which engages with existing thinking and moves it forward…. We welcome contributions from the best work of all perspectives and traditions…’. 64. Feminist Criminology was launched in 2006 as the official journal of the ASC’s Division on Women and Crime, ‘dedicated to research related to women, girls, and crime within the context of a feminist critique of criminology’ including ‘research on women working in the criminal justice profession, women as offenders and how they are dealt with in the criminal justice system, women as victims, and theories and tests of theories related to women and crime’: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/feminist-criminology/journal201772#editorial-board. Note that regionally or

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nationally-based criminology journals deploy adjectives to advertise the place of production not to qualify their criminological subject-matter; that is to say, for example, it is the British Journal of Criminology, not the Journal of British Criminology. 65. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/44592?redirectedFrom=critical#eid. 66. Panu Minkkinen, ‘Critical Legal “Method” as Attitude’ in Dawn Watkins and Mandy Burton (eds), Research Methods in Law (Routledge 2013) 135. 67. This is a fairly standard view amongst professional philosophers, see e.g. Lord Quinton, ‘Philosophy’ in Ted Honderich (ed), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (OUP 2005; on-line 2012). 68. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, ‘Critical Criminology in Britain: Review and Prospects’ in Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young (eds), Critical Criminology (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1975). 69. Ibid 8, 20. 70. Stanley Cohen, ‘Against Criminology’ in Cohen, Against Criminology (Transaction Books 1988). 71. Ibid 8. 72. Martin Amis, The Second Plane (Vintage 2008). 73. Philippe Sands, Torture Team (Allen Lane 2008); Jeremy Waldron, Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs: Philosophy for the White House (OUP 2010). 74. Richard Collier, ‘Dangerousness, Popular Knowledge and the Criminal Law: A Case Study of the Paedophile as Sociocultural Phenomenon’ in Peter Alldridge and Chrisje Brants (eds), Personal Autonomy, The Private Sphere and Criminal Law (Hart 2001). 75. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families (Picador 2000); Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil (Arrow Books 2004); Richard J Goldstone, For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator (Yale UP 2000); Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging (Vintage 1994). 76. As clearly emerges from Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed Colin Gordon (Harvester 1980). 77. Sumner, Obituary, 280. 78. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, ‘Critical Criminology in Britain: Review and Prospects’ in Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young (eds), Critical Criminology (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1975) 28, 44, 54.

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79. Colin Sumner, ‘Rethinking Deviance: Towards A Sociology of Censure’ in Sumner (ed), Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (Open UP 1990) 30. Note that the original version of this essay was published in 1983, based on a 1981 conference paper. 80. When I first started teaching in the early 1990s, my colleagues and I lectured on Marxist Criminology as one prominent strand of contemporary criminological theorising. Before long it became apparent, from a sea of blank faces staring back at us with bemusement and incomprehension, that we might as well have been talking about the theological beliefs of the ancient Egyptians. Thatcher’s children! 81. Taylor, Walton and Young, ‘Critical Criminology in Britain’, 45. 82. See e.g. Paul Q Hirst, ‘Marx and Engels on Law, Crime and Morality’ in Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young (eds), Critical Criminology (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1975) (categorically denying the possibility of any ‘Marxist theory of deviance’); with a reply by Taylor and Walton (‘idiosyncratic… polemic… assertive… contentious… caricature… illusion’), followed by Hirst’s rejoinder (‘internally contradictory… misreading… inadequate and erroneous… fetishism’). Generally, see Hugh Collins, Marxism and Law (OUP 1982); Maureen Cain and Alan Hunt (eds), Marx and Engels on Law (Academic Press 1979); Roger Cotterrell, The Sociology of Law: An Introduction (Butterworths 2/e 1992) chs 4–5; David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society (OUP 1990) chs 4–5; Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G Rule, EP Thompson and Cal Winslow (eds), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (1975). The epitome of Marxism-inspired criminology remains Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Macmillan 1978). 83. The way Andy Williams tells it, in Forensic Criminology (Routledge 2015), you can almost see the scars on his back (‘sociological explanations tend[] to be dismissive or, worse, engage in vitriolic attacks on anything remotely scientific… a disdain for general positivistic methods, which is usually transmitted from academic generation to generation without any true critical reflection’). 84. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, ‘Critical Criminology in Britain: Review and Prospects’ in Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young (eds), Critical Criminology (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1975) 46. 85. Sumner, ‘Rethinking Deviance’, 27.

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86. Sumner, Obituary, 310. 87. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (OUP 1972) §1.2. 88. See further, Jill Hunter, Paul Roberts, Simon NM Young and David Dixon (eds), The Integrity of Criminal Process (Hart 2016). 89. Jock Young, The Criminological Imagination (Polity 2011) 35. 90. Ibid 48. 91. Ben Goldacre, Bad Science (Fourth Estate 2008). 92. Cf Jock Young, The Criminological Imagination (Polity 2011) 10–13. 93. Ibid 32. 94. One illustration may suffice here. Young, ibid 190–191, presents a graphic designed to illustrate the ‘selective vision’ of ‘positivist criminology’. It is a funnel or inverted triangle, with ‘social harms’ at the top, proceeding through narrowing strata of ‘criminal laws’, ‘crimes’, ‘suspicions’, ‘arrests’, and finally, the small apex of ‘prisoners’ at the bottom. Viewed sympathetically, in the manner advocated in the first part of this essay, the graphic does a decent job of illustrating the— hardly novel or controversial—point that populations of prisoners or arrestees are only a small and highly selective subset of those who have actually broken criminal laws or engaged in socially harmful behaviour that, for one reason or another, is not currently criminalised, in law or fact. From the reflex perspective of a criminal justice scholar, however, Young has completely ‘overlooked’ or ‘forgotten’ every stage of criminal investigation, prosecution, trial, sentencing, appeals and post-conviction remedies (not to mention all forms of diversion and non-custodial penalties) between arrest and imprisonment. What a bizarre and woefully incomplete depiction of criminological subjectmatter that omits most of what criminal justice scholars and penologists study! Tu quoque. 95. This argument is well-made by Ronald Dworkin, ‘Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It’ (1996) 25 Philosophy and Public Affairs 87. For a good illustration of contemporary philosophical scepticism, see Bryan Frances, Scepticism Comes Alive (OUP 2005); or more approachably, see Christopher Grau (ed), Philosophers Explore The Matrix (OUP 2005). 96. Cf Danny Dorling, Dave Gordon, Paddy Hillyard, Christina Pantazis, Simon Pemberton and Steve Tombs, Criminal Obsessions: Why Harm Matters More than Crime (CCJS 2/e 2008); Paddy Hillyard, Christina Pantazis, Steve Tombs and Dave Gordon (eds), Beyond Criminology:

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Taking Harm Seriously (Pluto Press 2004), incisively reviewed by Jeffrey Reiman (2006) 46 British Journal of Criminology 362. 97. R A Duff, Lindsay Farmer, S E Marshall, Massimo Renzo and Victor Tadros (eds), Criminalization: The Political Morality of the Criminal Law (OUP 2014); A P Simester and Andreas von Hirsch, Crimes, Harms and Wrongs: On the Principles of Criminalisation (Hart 2011); Douglas Husak, Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law (OUP 2008); Michael Moore, Placing Blame: A Theory of Criminal Law (OUP 1997); Joel Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, vols I-IV (OUP 1984–1988). 98. For methodological exemplars, see Robert Reiner, Crime (Polity 2016); Barbara Hudson, Justice in the Risk Society (Sage 2004); Nicola Lacey, Celia Wells and Dirk Meure, Reconstructing Criminal Law (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1990). 99. Attributed to Hegel’s sideswipe at ‘his former friend’ Schelling: cf Michael S Moore, Educating Oneself in Public: Critical Essays in Jurisprudence (OUP 2000). 100. Stanley Cohen, ‘Crime and Politics: Spot the Difference’ (1996) 47 British Journal of Sociology 1. 101. David R Simon, Elite Deviance (Routledge 10/e 2011). 102. Formative texts include Carol Smart, Law, Crime and Sexuality (Sage 1995); Dee Cook and Barbara Hudson (eds), Racism and Criminology (Sage 1993); Phil Scraton (ed), Law, Order and the Authoritarian State (Open UP 1987); Steven Box, Power, Crime, and Mystification (Routledge 1983). Generally, see David Whyte, Crimes of the Powerful: A Reader (Open UP 2008); Penny Green and Tony Ward, State Crime (Pluto Press 2004); David Nelken (ed), WhiteCollar Crime (Dartmouth 1994); James W Messerschmidt, Crime as Structured Action: Gender, Race, Class and Crime in the Making (Sage USA 1997); Wayne Morrison, Theoretical Criminology: From Modernity to Post-Modernism (Cavendish 1995). 103. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, ‘Critical Criminology in Britain: Review and Prospects’ in Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young (eds), Critical Criminology (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1975), 46. 104. Ibid 54. 105. Young, The Criminological Imagination, 184. Young’s own reply, ibid 217, is that ‘critical criminology in this age of the Gulag and the punitive turn is massively needed, it is the counter-voice to

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neo-liberalism and conservativism. And what is more critical criminology is flourishing’. I want to agree, but am thrown back on the conceptual indeterminacy and disciplinary elusiveness of the ‘critical’. 106. A point that really shouldn’t have to be repeated to sociologists after Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Polity 1989); or to legal scholars after Nuremberg: cf David Fraser, Law After Auschwitz: Towards a Jurisprudence of the Holocaust (Carolina Academic Press 2005). 107. Generally, see Loraine Gelsthorpe and Allison Morris (eds), Feminist Perspectives in Criminology (Open UP 1990); and overlapping with legal scholarship, Nicola Lacey, Unspeakable Subjects: Feminist Essays in Legal and Social Theory (Hart 1998); Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (Routledge 1989). 108. See e.g. Jock Young, The Criminological Imagination, 180 (‘There are two criminologies: one grants meaning to crime and deviance, one that takes it away… one that is the voice of those below and the investigator of the powerful, the other which echoes the white noise of the criminal justice system’). Reducing the entire diverse pluralistic spectrum of criminological research and theorising to just two, diametrically opposed mirror-images was presumably only a rhetorical flourish rather than a serious contribution to disciplinary taxonomy or critical evaluation. 109. Alexander Liazos, ‘The Poverty of the Sociology of Deviance: Nuts, Sluts and Preverts’ (1972) 20 Social Problems 103. The deliberate misspelling of ‘perverts’ is one of Criminology’s enduringly delicious injokes. 110. Colin Sumner, ‘Introduction: Contemporary Socialist Criminology’ in Sumner (ed), Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (Open UP 1990) 10.

Author Biography Paul Roberts is Professor of Criminal Jurisprudence at the University of Nottingham, School of Law, and an adjunct professor at the universities of New South Wales, Sydney, and China University of Political Science and Law,

Thinking Through Critical Criminology     45

Beijing. Roberts teaches and researches in the fields of criminal procedure and evidence, comparative criminal justice, legal theory. research methods, and forensic science, and has published extensively on all these topics. His most recent book (co-edited with Hunter, Young and Dixon) is The Integrity of Criminal Process (Hart, 2016).

Censure: Moral and Sociological Lindsay Farmer

Introduction The concept of censure is central to two influential theories, both ­developed at the University of Cambridge in the 1980s and 1990s. On the one hand, there is Colin Sumner’s ambitious attempt to reconstruct the theoretical foundations of the discipline of criminology by replacing the sociology of deviance with a sociology of censure.1 On the other hand, there is Andreas von Hirsch’s development of a theory of punishment and criminal law that was also organised around the central concept of censure. As I shall show, both theories can be read as responses to the decline of penal welfarism and to the shifts in penal policy and practice that accompanied the rise of neoliberalism in this period. However, in spite of this, and the fact that they share the central I would like to thank Sarah Armstrong for her comments on an earlier draft.

L. Farmer (*)  University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_2

47

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concept of censure, it is curious that they do not engage with each other. Sumner’s account is sociological; von Hirsch’s is normative. The former opens up the possibility of a social account of criminal law and punishment that is linked to economic and political institutions; the latter is concerned with the fairness of individual punishment, seeking to engage with normative dimensions of censure and disapproval and to articulate the grounds on which censure, and thus punishment, might be justified. Thus, while the two theories are both concerned with crime and punishment, they talk past each other and make no attempt to engage with the other. In this paper, then, I want to explore the possible relationships, if any, between the two concepts of censure and to look at whether the concept of censure might be used in a way which brings the two approaches closer together.

A Sociology of Censure Sumner’s distinctive account aims at a reconstruction of criminology as a sociology of censure.2 This comprises two interconnected strands, one rooted in his work on a Marxist concept of ideology and the other in a historical analysis of the sociology of deviance. The first strand was developed in Sumner’s work from the 1970s onwards—in part as a critique of the (at the time) dominant sociology of deviance, and also in an engagement with strands of radical criminology which variously sought to construct, or to reject the possibility of, a Marxist theory of crime and deviance.3 Sumner argued that the underlying problem with the sociology of deviance, and with Marxist attempts to radicalise the analysis of deviance, was that it treated “deviance” and crime as though they were objective social categories. This meant that the discipline of criminology was thrown onto investigating the characteristics of criminals or “deviants” in order to explain the phenomenon of crime, rather than looking at the way that the categories of deviance or crime were themselves constructed and deployed.4 These categories, he argued, were based on an implicit claim to moral and political consensus, against which deviance was to be judged. Thus, rather than focusing on the behaviour or conduct, it was important to

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focus on the means by which the consensus—the dominant moral or political code—was constructed and thus how certain behaviours come to be labelled as deviant. If there was no underlying reality of crime or deviance, what these concepts had in common was that they were conduct that had been labelled as such by the state. This required a recognition that criminal or moral judgments were not based on any objective reality, but reflected social and class conflicts over meaning. Thus, as Stuart Hall and his collaborators famously argued, the category of mugging was deployed in the early 1970s by state and media as a form of censure which enabled a new kind of “law and order” politics.5 From this perspective, then, deviance was to be understood as an ideological concept, in the sense that it was used as a way of producing a particular world view that reflected class interests and that therefore the way forward was to use a theory of ideology as a means of developing the analysis.6 The concept of censure was thus intended to open up historical and sociological analyses of the way that judgments about deviancy were made, about the meaning of conduct to the participants, and of the kind of social, political and economic interests that censures represented. Censures were thus defined as “negative ideological categories with specific historical application”.7 The second strand is most clearly articulated in his book The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary (1994), in which Sumner argued that the sociology of deviance is tied to a particular governmental project, itself ­connected to the development and decline of the welfare state.8 The origins of the sociology of deviance were traced to the foundational work of Emile Durkheim, which while recognising deviance as a social phenomenon also saw the role of the state as being that of managing and controlling deviance. This governmental project then developed over the course of the twentieth century as deviancy theory was connected to institutional developments in criminal justice and “corrections”. However, Sumner argues that the study of deviancy ran its course as both an intellectual and a governmental project in the 1960s and 1970s as the post-World War Two consensus unravelled. The intellectual unravelling began with the work of those such as Matza who questioned taking deviancy as the central category of analysis and focused instead on the role of the state (or state actors) in defining deviant conduct and

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the building of “deviant” identities—in particular in relation to forms of “deviant” conduct such as drug taking or homosexuality.9 Once it was recognised that ideas about deviancy relied on an implicit account of a dominant normative order, it was essential to study how that order itself was created. For those following Matza, the study of deviancy thus increasingly shifted from the nature of the conduct or “deviants” themselves to the bodies or processes that defined or labelled conduct as deviant. Sumner then goes on to argue that this contradiction between the ameliorative project of the sociology of deviance and state power became even more stark as the welfare state was dismantled, with criminal law being used more nakedly as the exercise of class power. In the absence of a clear shared normative order, criminal law in a neoliberal order stands revealed as the censure or blaming of conducts that are threatening to social order or morally disapproved of by the dominant socio-economic classes. Here, censure seems to have a more specific historical character: If the 1960s were a time of deviance, in thought and in action, this new century is a time of censure both in thought and in action.10

Censure here takes the form of indiscriminate blaming for political purposes to buttress the power of the state or particular social groups: “the eighties marked a return to an older set of judgments about wickedness and its fiscal cost”.11 This socio-historical account of censure thus not only seeks to demonstrate how particular censuring practices are organised around particular themes and the way that these themselves are linked to particular political projects, but also identifies “censure” as a practice specific to the neoliberal state. This is an important and powerful critique of the intellectual project which the sociology of deviance represents. However, there is also a clear sense of normative disapproval in Sumner’s usage of the term “censure” in the work making up this second strand, though the grounds for this are not fully articulated. He condemns the use of the criminal law as a nakedly “censuring” practice and the depoliticising practices of censuring and blaming others, which he argues characterise contemporary neo-liberal societies:

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It is producing the censorious society of proto-saints—an entropic entity with no goals other than the slander and defeat of the immediate enemy today… The censure floats free of restraint and has become as anonymously unattached as money.12

At the same time, he argues for the reinvigoration of a moral code that would censure the practices of the rich and powerful on the basis of a new kind of ethics, based on the building of new kinds of legitimacy.13 The “sociology of censure” can thus describe either the general historical reconstruction of the sociology of deviance, or the more specific historical project of understanding the use of censure and punishment in neoliberalism or late capitalism, or indeed the reconstructive ethical project hinted at in his more recent writings. The principal strength of the sociology of censures approach, in my view, is the focus on censuring practices rather than qualities of the conduct itself. Sumner’s is a non-essentialist approach that demands that we look at the kinds of censure, the institutional forms that they take, the way that certain normative understandings are built up around these censures, and the way that these are linked to social institutions and power structures. This is exemplified by Sumner’s historical analysis of the sociology of deviancy “project”, but can and should be extended to other periods and areas. This kind of approach opens the path to a more systematic analysis of how values come to be organised in a certain way in institutions such as the criminal law so as to ask what is distinctive about censure through the criminal law. In Sumner’s more recent work, he has introduced a normative dimension to this project, claiming also to see it as an attempt to develop a theory of “morality, democracy and justice”—though the grounds for this remoralisation, or its connection to the broader sociology of censure project, are only gestured at.14

Censure and Sanctions This same period saw a parallel revival of interest in the idea of censure in criminal law theory. Beginning in the 1970s, Andreas von Hirsch was producing a body of work which challenged contemporary sentencing

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practices, in particular individualised treatment and indeterminate sentences, arguing that sentencing should be strictly proportional to the seriousness of the crime.15 This movement was in significant part motivated by the critique of the rehabilitative ideal which developed in the late 1960 and 1970s which identified harsh and indeterminate sentences as one of the major failings of penal welfarism. This was driven by a liberal, rights-based, agenda—seeking to limit punishment by moving from a consequentialist to a non-consequentialist, retributive, justification for punishment. The aim was to punish less, focusing on not doing harm instead of seeking to do good through punishment.16 Doing justice to the accused and to the victims of crime was seen as more important than utilitarian concerns with crime prevention. Penal theory accordingly began to focus on questions of sentencing, seeing the reduction of discretion in sentencing as a way of addressing the abuses of some rehabilitative practices. Von Hirsch’s influential theory of punishment came to focus on the concept of censure, which he identified with the retributive justification of punishment. This was most clearly articulated in his book, Censure and Sanctions (1993).17 This took the form of an argument about the justification of punishment. He began this by arguing that censure was a form of blaming or condemnation that was “desert-oriented by nature”.18 It was desert oriented because on his account a person is entitled to condemn (punish) only if they have reason to believe that conduct is wrongful, and only to the extent of the wrongfulness of the conduct. Punishment which was not for wrongdoing, or whose harshness or severity exceeded the extent of the wrong committed was thus prima facie unjustified. However, he also argued that this form of moral address required to be supplemented with hard treatment (punishment) which would provide the offender with prudential reasons for obedience.19 Thus, while there was a linkage between censure, as the general justifying aim of punishment, and a consequentialist concern that punishment was necessary to prevent crime, the sanction was to be understood primarily as a form of censure. Censure appealed to the offender as an agent as part of the process of holding them responsible, or calling them to account, for their conduct. It addressed, first, the victim, or the person who had been wronged, and was an acknowledgement

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of the wrong that had been done to them. Second, it addressed the wrongdoer(s) and it carried an expectation of some response from them or an acknowledgement of the wrongfulness of their conduct. And third, it addressed the wider community, communicating the disapproval of the wrongdoing and providing reasons for desistance from such conduct in future. Censure was thus “embodied in the prescribed sanction” because it was embedded in a complex relational structure of moral agency.20 It is central to von Hirsch’s account that censure is communicative and expressive, seeing punishment as embodying a form of “social and symbolic communication” between offender, victim and the wider community.21 This, in itself, taps into a broader movement in moral philosophy in which it has been argued that the attribution of responsibility is relational, taking place within a broader network of actors and institutions. On this view, responsibility should not be understood as a fundamental attribute of the actor (such as free will), but as rooted in social practices of answerability between agents and institutions. This seeks to ground the abstract concept of responsibility in social practices of holding ourselves and others to account.22 The very idea of censure thus implies both recognition of the moral agency of victims and perpetrators and a form of moral communication between the various participants. Censure is grounded in the community practices of calling to account and should be understood ideally as promoting a form of moral dialogue in the community. Censure thus has an intrinsic moral and symbolic structure which seeks both to address the wrongdoer about their past wrongdoing and to shape future conduct.23 This account of censure also has implications for the substantive criminal law.24 A legal censure must identify conduct that is wrongful and declare this publicly, and in advance—so that the addressee “should consider its wrongfulness (and not just the threat of adverse consequences) as reason to desist”.25 The criminal law’s claim to legitimate authority thus rests in part on the content of the norm (its wrongfulness) and in part on the modality of law. Criminal law is a form of regulation which addresses legal persons as moral agents. This is thus to identify something distinctive about criminal law which can distinguish it from other modes of crime control or regulation.26

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This is thus an account of censure which has considerable intellectual coherence and appeal, grounding the justification of punishment and criminal law in an account of individual moral agency and seeing censure as a particular way of identifying and responding to wrongful conduct. Its strength lies in the recognition of offenders as moral agents who are also always part of a wider political community, as well as its commitment to parsimony in punishment. But, these points also raise significant questions. Many of these concerns centre on the question of the legitimacy of censure practices.27 For von Hirsch legitimacy can appear to be internal to the concept of censure: if a wrongful act has been committed, and the penalty is not disproportionate to the wrong, then the censure is prima facie legitimate. The difficulty, though, is that the legitimacy of the criminal law and the criminal justice system depends not only on moral, or even legal, reasons but also on a wider range of political and social factors—and for an account that sees censure as authoritative expression of disapproval von Hirsch has remarkably little to say about structures of authority. This point can be illustrated by considering the phenomenon of mass imprisonment in the USA.28 Individual punishments may be legally valid, in the sense of imposed by legally constituted courts according to pre-established rules, and justified in terms of retribution or individual desert; the problem is that the system as a whole is criticised for illegitimacy because of over-punishment and the disproportionate impact on certain ethnic communities. This broader issue is not something that can be addressed only by limiting the amount of punishment (e.g. calling for proportionally shorter sentences, or challenging the idea of desert) because punishment is part of a larger system where issues of social inequality and the political use of the criminal law are central.29 This is also linked to a further point, which is that it is implicit in this type of expressive account that punishment should articulate shared wrongs which encapsulate or reflect the views of the “community” or the wider society. The theory assumes the existence of moral consensus, or at least a potential for consensus, both in the identification of “wrongs” and in the idea that criminal justice system actors are justified in acting on behalf of the community.30 The problem, though, is that the evidence in support of the existence of this kind of moral consensus about

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wrongdoing, or shared trust in the criminal justice system, is limited— and indeed that this kind of trust can be weakened by policies such as mass incarceration.31 The conceptual neatness of the theory arguably breaks down when it comes into contact with the actual practices of criminal justice systems or, indeed, actual social practices.32

Rethinking Censure On the face of it, there is little in common between these two accounts of censure. Von Hirsch’s account is the epitome of an approach rejected by Sumner: an individualist account articulated in terms of a claim to universal values, which pays little heed to social context or power relations. Indeed, far from being an expression of power, the concept of censure, on von Hirsch’s account, is viewed as a means of controlling or limiting power. Likewise, from von Hirsch’s perspective, Sumner’s account of censure might appear to lack normative grounding, and give insufficient weight to the significance of law as a particular kind of censuring practice. Both are universalising, but in hugely different ways. Von Hirsch’s account seeks to identify the normative core of censuring practices in an account of moral agency; Sumner originally sees the concept of censure as a morally neutral term that will allow us to analyse a range of different censuring practices. While von Hirsch goes back to “classical” theories of criminal law and moral philosophy to focus on questions of normative justification, Sumner is developing a meta-theoretical account of the political economy of law and crime. How, then, are we to think about the relation between the two ideas of censure? Are the two simply incommensurable, in spite of the common terminology?33 At one level, I think this is certainly the case for the reasons set out above. However, in this final part of the paper, I want to explore some possible ways of developing a common ground between the two accounts. One possible starting place for doing this is Stan Cohen’s paper “On Guilt, Justice and Tolerance” which, like both Sumner and von Hirsch, was responding to the collapse of the rehabilitative ideal and the breakdown of the post-war consensus in the 1970s. In this paper, Cohen

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argued that an impasse had been reached: the “new” or radical criminology was increasingly focused on the labelling processes, rather than a supposed underlying reality of “crime” but, in doing so, failed to respond to concerns that people were the victims of crime or to recognise that (at least some) offenders deserved to be punished. By contrast, Cohen acknowledged that part of the political appeal of the “back to justice” movement, represented by people like von Hirsch, was that their critique of criminal justice rested on an appeal to normative concepts such as guilt and justice. Cohen accordingly challenged critical criminologists to address and articulate the normative presuppositions of their own work in order to re-engage with the political relevance of their work.34 The central claim that Cohen makes is that: the interests of the state lie in prohibiting certain action and punishing those responsible for this action. The questions these interests raise (and always have) about justice, tolerance, morality, guilt, and responsibility are only now being considered in the new criminologies. I believe it is only by putting them firmly on the agenda that the connections with criminal justice politics can be made.35

Cohen argued that it was necessary to develop a new kind of criminal justice politics such that radical criminology did not place itself in the position of the outright rejection of all forms of regulation or social control. In other words, he argued that criminologists should avoid a complete moral relativism that saw all labels as arbitrarily imposed, and should instead interrogate the meanings of concepts such as guilt, responsibility and justice. These, he argued, were not necessarily only abstract conceptual building blocks cut-off from any social reality, nor ideological cover for the naked exercise of power, but could also articulate socially meaningful practices in terms of which the conduct of social actors and institutions could be judged. This involved the further recognition that an institution such as the criminal law (or something like it) was necessary to most (if not all) societies, as even socially just societies would require some sort of regulation of conduct and a system for allocating blame and making judgments.36 The point, therefore, for him was not to reject the criminal law (or an account of guilt

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and justice) outright, but to locate the discussion of legal practices and concepts in a broader critique by understanding how the institution had developed and whose interests it served, but also why the law continued to have a broad social appeal and to be a meaningful way of understanding and judging conduct.37 This project, it seems to me, is no closer to fulfilment than when Cohen wrote. However, by bringing together some of the insights from both accounts of censure, it is possible to outline how Cohen’s basic insight might be developed. Our starting point must be Cohen’s claim that it is necessary to reflect on the question of the sense in which a person accused of having committed a crime might be guilty. This clearly is not a straightforward question to answer, as we should not simply fall back, as many moral philosophers do, on our supposed or assumed moral intuitions or emotions about the wrongfulness of conduct or the meaning of guilt.38 These are socially constructed and cannot be treated as though they give us any sort of direct access to truth. Guilt is a complex matter involving subjective feelings and judgments as well as being embedded in the long history of our legal, religious and moral institutions.39 One element of the reflection on guilt is the need to engage with the practices, the motives and the characters of those who break social norms—to decide, in Becker’s terms, whose side we are on.40 This also relates to what Cottee has called the “moral framing” of offenders within criminology, or the need for a reflexive criminology that is capable of articulating the moral implications of its explanatory models.41 A further dimension, though, is the need for criminologists (and criminal lawyers) to engage with the systems and institutions that identify and condemn offenders—something that more directly confronts Sumner’s deployment of the concept of censure. Guilt is a moral concept, but it is also a legal concept, and while legal conceptions of guilt are related to moral conceptions, they also operate within, and are shaped by, a distinct set of institutions such as the criminal law.42 It is thus important to understand how the criminal law operates not only as a system of blame allocation but also as a system that gives meaning to certain forms of conduct. This is a matter of understanding the ways that it identifies forms of conduct to be censured, differentiates between different actions and actors, and the terms in which, and procedures through which, it

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condemns and punishes. And crucially, of course, it also means that we need to address the question of the sense in which certain forms of censure or punishment are deserved. Neoclassical accounts of criminal law and punishment, such as that advocated by von Hirsch, have unquestionably taken the question of guilt seriously. Indeed, the commitment to deserved punishment in his theory was based, as we have seen, on the claim that the degree of deserved punishment could be calibrated to the degree of culpability—that censure was intrinsically related to guilt. This was articulated with the aim of reducing punishment though, as many commentators have pointed out, the adoption of the justice-model was accompanied in practice by a relentless increase in the lengths of sentences and in the numbers of those imprisoned in many jurisdictions.43 At the very least, this kind of retributive theory does not seem to have restrained punishment as it originally promised to do. A significant weakness of the theory, though, has been that this account of desert in punishment was not matched by a developed understanding of the concept of crime—that is to say that it largely took existing institutional structures for granted. It was, to this extent, a theory of punishment without an adequate theory of crime, and thus as a theory of censure, it could have only limited impact because it had little to say about the justification for the criminalization of particular crimes or, more broadly, little understanding of practices of criminalisation in modern society. In order for the normative critique of punishment to bite, I would argue that it is necessary additionally to develop a social theory of censures, along the lines set out by Sumner, that engages with the forms of particular censures, the kinds of knowledge that they produce and the interests that they serve. Crime and criminal laws, in other words, are not neutral conduits between moral values and punishing practices but are intrinsically linked to the development of the modern state and to the particular project of social stabilisation and pacification that it drives.44 One of the central features of the development of the modern criminal law has been a culture of individualism, expressed in the central concept of criminal responsibility.45 Modern liberal criminal law individualises, and there is a justified fear that it is consequently overly reductive of complex social relationships, and that its focus on rational

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decision-making reduces everything to a utility-maximising logic.46 The logic of individual responsibility in the criminal law has thus always sat awkwardly with sociologically oriented criminological explanations which have linked criminal conduct to structural and cultural explanations of the determinants of conduct.47 From this perspective, criminal law is easily treated as a state institution that legitimises the exercise of class power, and it is then difficult, as Cohen pointed out, to negotiate a path between a kind of social determinism that denies agency and a recognition of free will that seems to concede the legitimacy of the criminal law. An alternative way of approaching responsibility in criminal law, however, is to distinguish, as von Hirsch’s account of censure does, between a kind of methodological individualism, which sees individual agency (or free will) as a fixed feature of human nature, and the kind of account which sees responsibility as rooted in social practices of holding others to account.48 This kind of account sees responsibility as primarily relational, linked to different kinds of social processes and institutions through which members of particular communities are called on to answer for their conduct. The advantage of such an approach is that criminal responsibility is no longer seen as reflecting an underlying state of affairs (free will) which is antithetical to social theory, but is instead “rooted in the practices of defining the scope of responsibilities and of holding to account by the legal institution”.49 It is thus possible to distinguish between the practice of holding others responsible (censure in general) and the particular institutional forms that this takes. In other words, it is possible critically to assess particular practices of responsibilisation in the modern criminal law, while still recognising that responsibility practices more generally are a fundamental feature of social life. The question of criminal responsibility also requires us to address the question, raised by von Hirsch, of the specific characteristics of the criminal law as a censuring practice. A sociology of censures must acknowledge that there are different kinds of censuring practices and explore what it is that makes them distinctive. A key feature of criminal responsibility is that it creates a reasonably static object of legal attribution and application (the legal subject) which allows the articulation of norms capable of general application.50 That is to say that the institution of law posits that those to whom personality is attributed are those

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capable of acting in conformity to norms and being held responsible for breaches of those norms.51 This is the basis for legal censuring practices, and while this might be criticised, as we noted above, as a kind of abstraction from social realities, presupposing the subject as a responsible agent in this way has further implications for the form or modality of law. Rules must take the form of general norms directed at and capable of being understood and followed by persons deemed to possess the necessary capacities, and the attribution of responsibility for the breach of a norm should extend only to those who are recognised as possessing such capacities.52 The criminal law, in short, attributes a unique kind of agency to its subjects, and in doing so is itself subject to certain constraints. Laws should take the form of rules of general application, punishment should only be imposed on those found guilty under legal procedures, and only to the extent of their guilt, and so on. This is not to suggest that criminal law always meets these aspirations, for this is unfortunately not the case, nor that the law is not used for instrumental ends or to serve the interests of particular social groups; but where it departs from these standards, applies them in a partial way, or directly prefers the interests of one class over another, it is open to challenge and undermines its own legitimacy. This might be viewed as a restatement of the point made so elegantly by EP Thompson in the context of his discussion of repressive eighteenth-century criminal laws: It is true that in history the law can be seen to mediate and to legitimise existent class relations. Its forms and procedures may crystallise those relations and mask ulterior injustice. But this mediation, through the forms of law, is something quite distinct from the exercise of unmediated force. The forms and rhetoric of law acquire a distinct identity which may, on occasion, inhibit power and afford some protection to the powerless.53

This is important because both accounts of censure assume that it is justifiable to punish (presumably through law) genuinely harmful acts. There is, though, a crucial gap between the two accounts of censure, in that while von Hirsch’s account assumes a community of interests which has reasonably settled understandings of wrongs and harms, Sumner advances a powerful critique of censuring practices in neo-liberal society

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and argues that there is a need for a new ethical code to censure the harmful practices of the wealthy and powerful. This, once again, brings in the question of the range of censuring practices, but it is not only a matter of the sociology of censure, but also of the social legitimacy of censuring practices or, more narrowly, the normative basis of criminalization. The normative basis of Sumner’s critique is based, at least in part, on the relative degree of social harmfulness of certain types of conduct and on the continuing social exclusion of certain groups or communities—an exclusion that is reinforced by the practices of the criminal justice system. In pointing to the illegitimacy of neoliberal censure, it appeals to the possibility of a different social basis for legitimacy. But this is where more work needs to be done, for if the limitations of von Hirsch’s account of moral community are clear, we should be wary about replacing this with the claim to the existence of another, morally superior, community. The claim is perhaps better understood in a political register as a matter of opening up debate about the political legitimacy of the criminal law. A theory of censure should not be allowed to shut down such claims about political legitimacy, but should rather be used to open them up.

Conclusion The concept of censure, as developed in different ways, in the work of Sumner and von Hirsch, has enormous potential—though each of the accounts has its own limitations—and this potential might be greater yet if we are able to draw on the strengths of both theories. In this chapter, I have tried to show some way in which there is a common ground between them, and to offer some suggestions as to ways that this common ground might be developed, bringing criminology and criminal law theory into a new kind of dialogue.

Notes 1. C. Sumner, The Sociology of Deviance. An Obituary (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994).

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2. See e.g. C. Sumner, “Marxism and Deviancy Theory” in P. Wiles (ed), The Sociology of Crime and Delinquency in Britain (London: Martin Robertson, 1976); C. Sumner (ed), Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (Buckingham: Open Unive Press, 1990); “The Social Nature of Crime and Deviance” in Sumner (ed), The Blackwell Companion to Criminology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). I have greatly benefited from reading D. Moxon, “Marxism and the Definition of Crime” (2011) 5(2) In-Spire Journal of Law, Politics and Society 102–120. 3. See I. Taylor, P. Walton & J. Young, The New Criminology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); See also essays in I. Taylor, P. Walton & J. Young (eds.), Critical Criminology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). These are discussed in Sumner, Sociology of Deviance, ch. 10. 4. See Sociology of Deviance, pp. 309–310 for a summary discussion of the weaknesses of category of deviance. 5. S. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis. Mugging, the State and Law and Order (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978). 6. Building on his analysis in Reading Ideologies. An Investigation into the Marxist Theory of Ideology and Law (London: Academic Press, 1979). 7. Sumner, “Rethinking Deviance. Towards a Sociology of Censure” in Sumner (ed), Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990), p. 26. See also Sumner, The Sociology of Deviance, p. 303. 8. Supra n.1. See also “Censure, Culture and Political Economy. Beyond the Death of Deviance Debate” in S. Hall & S. Winlow (eds), New Directions in Criminological Theory (London: Routledge, 2012). 9. D. Matza, Becoming Deviant (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969). 10. Sumner, “Censure, Culture and Political Economy”, p. 165. 11. Sumner, Sociology of Deviance, p. 310; Sumner, “Beyond”: “From deviance to censure is not just a shift in sociological theory, but also a change in the way societies operate”, (p. 174). 12. Sumner, Sociology of Deviance, p. 313. 13. Sumner, “Beyond”: “There is certainly a need for a critical re-moralization of society” (p. 174); “the censure and punishment of the bankers could be the starting point of a new moral order or at least the recognition of the idea and reality of the moral economy”, (p. 178).

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14. Sociology of Deviance, p. 304. See also “Beyond”, p. 174 calling for a major restatement of the criminal law based on a “democratization and rationalization of social censures”. 15. See in particular Doing Justice. The Choice of Punishments (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976); Past or Future Crimes. Deservedness and Dangerousness in the Sentencing of Criminals (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986). There is discussion of the development of his ideas in A. Duff & D. Garland, A Reader on Punishment (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), pp. 112–114. 16. See the discussion in S. Cohen, “Guilt, Justice and Tolerance: Some Old Concepts for a New Criminology” in Against Criminology (London: Transaction, 1998) at pp. 131ff. 17. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996). See also A.E. Bottoms, “5 Puzzles in von Hirsch’s Theory of Punishment” in A. Ashworth & M. Wasik, Fundamentals of Sentencing Theory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) esp. at pp. 77–95. 18. Censure and Sanctions, p. 24. 19. Censure and Sanctions, p. 14; Duff & Garland, Reader, pp. 112–113. 20. Censure and Sanctions, p. 11. 21. Although in his more recent writings he concedes that censure “generally involves authoritative expressions of disapproval”: see A.P. Simester & A. von Hirsch, Crimes, Harms and Wrongs. On the Principles of Criminalisation (Abingdon: Hart Publishing, 2011), p. 13. See also Bottoms, “5 Puzzles”, p. 86. cf. J. Feinberg, “The Expressive Function of Punishment” (1965) 49 The Monist 397–423; R.A. Duff, Punishment, Communication and Community (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). 22. P. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment” in J. Fischer & M. Ravizza, Perspectives on Moral Responsibility (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993); C. Kutz, “Responsibility” in J. Coleman et al., The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004). 23. See Duff, Punishment, at p. 80. 24. Simester & von Hirsch, Crimes, ch. 1. 25. Simester & von Hirsch, Crimes, p. 11. 26. Cf. Bottoms, “5 Puzzles”, pp. 90–91 who is more concerned with the content or the source of the norm. It is not that these features are unimportant, but that he is not attending to the mode of responsibilization.

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2 7. A point made by Bottoms, “5 Puzzles”, pp. 93–94 28. M. Alexander, The New Jim Crow. Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010); D. Garland (ed), Mass Imprisonment. Social Causes and Consequences (London: Sage, 2001). 29. V. Chiao, “Mass Incarceration and the Theory of Punishment” forthcoming Criminal Law and Philosophy (DOI 10.1007/s11572-0159378-x). 30. See e.g. Censure and Sanctions, p. 5 expressing a kind of Rawlsian view about a system of sanctions that all members of the community might in principle agree to. 31. See e.g. C. Muller & D. Schrage, “Mass Imprisonment and Trust in the Law” (2014) 651 Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 139–158. 32. See L. Farmer, Making the Modern Criminal Law. Criminalization and Civil Order (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016), pp. 103–115. 33. Cf. P. Roberts, “From Deviance to Censure. A ‘New’ Criminology for the Nineties” (1996) 59 Mod LR 125–144. 34. In S. Cohen, Against Criminology (London: Transaction Books, 1988). Some similar issues were raised in G. Pearson, The Deviant Imagination. Psychiatry, Social Work and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1975) cautioning against the romanticization of deviance and recognizing that there will be a need for moral judgments. For a more recent discussion see S. Cottee, “Judging Offenders: the moral implications of criminological theories” in M. Cowburn et al., Values in Criminology and Community Justice (Bristol: Policy Press, 2013). 35. Cohen, Against Criminology, p. 117. 36. Cohen, Against Criminology, p. 120. 37. Ibid p. 133 “locating justice model in broader critique and program”. 38. See L. Farmer, “Criminal Wrongs in Historical Perspective” in R.A. Duff et al., The Boundaries of the Criminal Law (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010). 39. See e.g. S. Ashenden & J. Brown, “Guilt: Introduction” (2014) 43:1 Economy & Society 1–18. 40. H. Becker, “Whose Side Are We On?” (1967) 14 Social Problems 239– 247. 41. Cottee, “Judging Offenders”, pp. 17–18. See now S. Armstrong et al., Reflexivity and Criminal Justice. Intersections of Policy, Practice and Research (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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42. C. Thornhill, “Guilt and the Origins of Modern Law” (2014) 43:1 Economy & Society 103–135. 43. See the discussion in N. Lacey & H. Pickard, “The Chimera of Proportionality” (2015) 78 Mod LR 216-40 at pp. 224–228. 44. R. Reiner, Crime (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), pp. 2–3; Farmer, Making the Modern Criminal Law, ch. 3. 45. N. Lacey, In Search of Criminal Responsibility. Ideas, Interests and Institutions (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016). 46. For the classic account see G. Becker, “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach” (1968) 76 Jnl. Of Political Economy 169–217. 47. See e.g. the discussion in Cottee, “Judging Offenders” supra n.34. 48. See the discussion in Kutz, supra n.22, at pp. 552–558. 49. See Farmer, Making the Modern Criminal Law, supra n.32, p. 169. While writers like von Hirsch argue that this reflects a fundamental or underlying structure of moral agency (thus bringing it back to a kind of methodological individualism), I argue here that this is not a necessary feature of this account. 50. Thornhill, “Guilt and the Origins of Modern Law” supra n.42. 51. N. MacCormick, Institutions of Law, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), p. 89. 52. Kutz, “Responsibility” supra n.22, p. 567. cf. L. Fuller, The Morality of Law (Revised edn.) (New Haven: Yale UP, 1969), pp. 181–184; K. Rundle, Forms Liberate (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012). 53. E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters. The Origins of the Black Act (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 266.

Restoring the Crime-Poverty-Class Inequality Link Colin Webster

In a deservedly popular book about why people commit crime, Gash (2016) argues that the notion that poverty is the real cause of crime is a widely held myth. Whether held in the criminological or popular imagination, the relationship between crime and poverty in which crime is seen as a consequence of direct need or various forms of inequality, is held to be spurious because crime rates are said to have dramatically declined whilst poverty and inequality has soared. Leaving aside for the moment that poverty and inequality are different phenomena, Gash refines the argument by saying that the relationship between poverty and crime does exist but is concentrated in specific sorts of locations. The link between concentrated poverty and crime, if we accept they are connected at the spatial level, is reinforced in situations whereby places are abandoned due to economic malaise, by those able (the most affluent and skilled) to leave. Those who remain either through loyalty or

C. Webster (*)  Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, England e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_3

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necessity become poorer thus driving out wealthier residents who fear growing crime. In these senses, rather than poverty causing crime, crime can lead to poverty as wealthier residents are driven out and economically weaker ones have to live in increasingly high crime areas. Gash’s (2016) conclusion from the research however about this ‘social sorting and selection’ of the population composing neighbourhoods is that such places are far less important than the influence of ‘close relations’ in families. Influential studies such as Sampson and Laub (1993: 247) concur about the importance of family, school, and peer influences over structural background factors like poverty or inequality. There is justification for Gash’s claims and yet, this chapter will defend the kernel of truth found in the crime–poverty–class inequality link. It is not that writers like Gash, who emphasizes the importance for example, of early-years parenting and good schools in influencing future or later delinquency and criminality, fail to acknowledge the relationship between poverty and crime, as we have seen. The problem is not understanding that poverty is not only income poverty and financial need, which are said to be poor motivators of criminality, it is that prolonged and intensive poverty experiences expose sufferers to longterm forms of chronic anxiety, insecurity and an inability to influence things when and if they go wrong. It is these longer-term psychosocial effects that tend to be ignored. This greatly increases the exposure of individuals to a series of risks making delinquency and criminal victimization more likely. Once ‘poverty’ is somewhat narrowly defined as for example, first and foremost about a general lack of sufficient material resources, then the relationship between poverty and crime is in danger of being reduced to a simple function of direct economic need rather than long-term anxiety and insecurity. Broken down into different sorts of poverty and poverty experiences, poverty can be accepted as a ‘necessary’ but not ‘sufficient’ cause of crime (Sayer 1992); that entrenched poverty exposes all members of a group experiencing that poverty to the sorts of risks, vulnerabilities and temptations leading to crime, making criminality more likely for some; that crime is a by-product of poverty in the sense that poverty mediates the probability of criminal solutions by individuals and groups; and that unpredictable, contingent factors come into play within poverty experiences that can turn some

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individuals towards and others away from crime; then the linking of poverty and crime becomes a more persuasive explanation of crime causation.

Poverty as a Necessary not Sufficient Cause: Establishing the Crime–Poverty–Inequality Link Our review and synthesis of longitudinal and international studies of the poverty–crime link published between 1980 and 2014, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report Reducing Poverty in the UK (Webster and Kingston 2014a, b), came to a number of conclusions that concur with some of the sorts of findings Fergusson has reproduced. In particular, that the poverty–crime relationship is linked to, and best understood by, the welfare–crime relationship (discussed later). Overall, although strong, the influence of poverty on crime is triggered by events and experiences of an intensity and duration not easily captured by the catch-all condition and connotation that general poverty alone brings. Triggers change over the lifespan and their significance may fade or come to the fore. Parental unemployment and income poverty, important for child development gives way at late teenage and young adulthood to the influence and availability of secure, stable employment. Our overall conclusions from aggregate data analyses of the relationship between income poverty, unemployment and underemployment have been made in terms of social and economic trends at a broader societal level. Trends in post-war economic inequality and poverty (and some of the adverse policies associated with these trends) correspond to long-term patterns of change in the national rate of property crime. The steepest rises in the rate of property crime occurred during the 1980s and early 1990s, coinciding with sharp increases in the level of unemployment and inequality. For example, as unemployment rose steeply from 1979, peaking in the mid-80s and mid-90s, it had immediate and long-term effects on the property crime rate. The unemployment rate is positively and strongly associated with the rate of acquisitive crime

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in Britain, but it is the severity and duration of unemployment (and underemployment) that is important. Unemployment also increases the likelihood of detection and severity of punishment, and greatly constrains an individual’s freedom to make positive choices to desist from crime. Virtually all recent studies find a strong relationship between dramatic increases in poverty and violent crime. Increases in murder over recent decades are predominantly murders of younger, poorer men, while richer areas have experienced opposite trends of low and declining murder rates. Poverty is the strongest predictor of area homicide rates, as part of a more general divisive effect of income inequality which weakens the social fabric. Finally, that long-term poverty adversely influences family functioning, engenders emotional stress and undermines emotional security, significantly increasing the risks of children beginning offending and continuing into teenage. Fergusson’s (2016) review of the literature emphasizes the importance of the circumstances and biographies of individuals. He cites Gronqvist’s (2011) longitudinal study of 700,000 Swedish 19 to 25-year-olds experiences of unemployment compared to the entire working age Swedish population, which included detailed case-bycase data. The study concluded that unemployment effects on committing theft were by far greater in the youth sample compared to the adult sample, even in a situation where the relatively generous welfare benefit entitlement of young people in Sweden contrasts heavily with places like the UK (see Table 1 below). It follows, as Fergusson (2016) suggests, that the UK’s extremely mean benefit regime and the lack of disposable income among unemployed young people of the same age would lead us to expect an increased probability of committing property crimes. A very recent study from New Zealand (Davis 2016) shows the impact of childhood poverty on later life is to produce a concentration of individual and social problems. Longitudinal studies, seeking to discover whether individuals from socio-economically disadvantaged and deprived environments have a greater propensity to engage in crime, come to similar conclusions. Another earlier cohort study from birth to age 21 years established a clear relationship between poverty and crime, but this reflected a life course process in which adverse

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family, individual, school, and peer factors combine to increase individual susceptibility to crime. Another longitudinal study of childhood and early adolescent delinquency in New Zealand found that young people who committed the most delinquent acts were those who ‘reported more financial strain, were more aggressive, were more alienated, had lower educational and occupational aspirations, had less social closeness, and had less self-control’ (Wright et al. 1999:185). Jarjoura et al.’s (2002) American study revealed that the longer a young person lives in poverty the more likely they are to engage in delinquent behaviour. Skarohamar (2009) followed a total Norwegian birth cohort finding a large adverse effect of both parental break-up and socio-economic factors on youth crime, despite Norway’s relatively egalitarian conditions and generous social security arrangements, which might have otherwise ameliorated parental disadvantage. The effect was stronger with longterm poverty compared to short-term poverty in terms of impact on crime. Nilsson et al. (2013) examined how a macro-structural economic crisis at a particular time influenced young adult’s resources and lives as they entered and exited unemployment. Based on the Stockholm Birth Cohort Study, the authors found that cumulative disadvantage inherited from families of origin were important structural constraints on individual’s life course and their room to cope with disadvantage. The unemployment crisis was felt most severely by those with the lowest level of resources and the most structural constraints due to their criminal involvement, whose ‘life success’ was curtailed by events outside their control. Hallsten and colleagues (2013) Swedish cohort study concluded that ethnicity was unlikely to be a strong cause of crime among immigrants. Rather, the majority of the gap in crime was accounted for by parental socio-economic resources and neighbourhood segregation (itself an expression of economic disadvantage). Verbruggen et al.’s (2012) longitudinal study of a group of high-offending Dutch men and women consistently show that employment reduced the number of convictions for both men and women. The longer the men were employed, the lesser the convictions for men but not women. As a final focus establishing the crime–poverty–inequality link is a concern about childhood poverty and the socialization effects of

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poverty as these are likely to grow with a 50% increase in UK child poverty by 2020 according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (CPAG 2017). Paradoxically perhaps, some of the best close-up qualitative studies of parenting and childhood, teenage and young adult socialization, and transitions show that the class-based gap among young people has greatly widened in recent decades. Putnam (2015) has shown that inequality in the US increasingly operates through education closely correlated with parental social class, whereas by comparison gender inequality has fallen sharply and although progress on racial difference has been less encouraging, racial gaps in income and family structure are falling. Of course, racial gaps in schooling and involvement with the criminal justice system remain immense and the ‘poverty deficit’ for black children greater. Lareau’s (2000) qualitative study shows us how parents go about using their resources to try to help their children succeed in school. This influential study of family–school relationships shows that the density and intensity of connections between parents and schools differs by social class and cannot be explained by ‘parenting styles’ nor parental values as attributes for failed schooling. Rather, parent’s education, occupational status, income, and the characteristics of their work provide parents with unequal resources and dispositions that affect parental involvement in the educational experience of their children. Lareau (2000: 173) concluded ‘that higher social class provides parents with more resources to intervene in schooling and to bind families into tighter connections with social institutions than are available to working-class families.’ Lareau’s (2011) follow-up study Unequal Childhoods showed that child rearing varies according to the concerted cultivation practised by middle-class parents of all ethnicities, and the accomplishment of ‘natural growth’ practised by working-class and poor parents. These different child-rearing practices, unrecognized by parents, provide potential advantages in the educational and occupational sorting process. Children’s activities (where parents closely monitor and intervene), schooling, and parent’s occupation are crucial resources influencing life experiences and outcomes, but keys are that they align with institutional and professional expectations, and that children undergo organized

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activities. A side effect of the study was to reveal that Black and white young people’s neighbourhood contact with the police institution is wholly negative if they are working-class and poor, and wholly positive if they are white and middle-class. This should not surprise us; studies of policing show that rather than selecting individuals suspected of having actually committed a crime, the polices’ belief about social status and class means that (Choongh 1998: 627): …an acceptable and efficient way to police society is to identify classes of people who in various ways reject prevailing norms because it is amongst these classes that the threat of crime is at its most intense… the police are then justified in subjecting them to surveillance and subjugation, regardless of whether the individuals selected for this treatment are violating the criminal law at any given moment. Nor does the story end there as Jennifer Silva’s (2013) close-up study of what it means to grow up as a young, working-class adult today in America. She describes growing up as involving ‘the hidden injuries of risk.’ These chronic insecurities and risks shouldered by the young men and women she spoke to had resulted from the disappearance of the solidarities and resources that were once a feature of working-class life. It might be of course, that their sense of anxiety and isolation has extended to groups beyond Silva’s ‘forgotten half ’ of working-class young people who do not attend college or university after secondary school in the US, UK, and Europe. Individuals attending university belonging to seemingly more ‘successful’ groups though are themselves highly stratified according to their class positions and experiences (Arnett 2015; Antonucci 2016). Here, age as well as class designates youth and young adult transitions as increasingly extended and precarious. Perhaps of all the studies reviewed here, Dekeseredy and colleague’s (2003) study most directly set out to discover the relationship between joblessness, concentrated poverty, and crime in six Canadian public housing estates. As has been the case in many other advanced western societies in recent decades, and especially in the United Sates, Canadian concentrated urban family poverty has increased markedly. The reasons the authors site are familiar despite some national variations: the rise of the ‘precarious’ workforce; people who can move from poor or declining

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urban communities leaving poorer members behind; transnational corporations moving operations to lower waged developing countries; the move of employment to the suburbs; replacement of routine tasks by new technology; and the shift from a manufacturing to a service-based economy (p. 8). Consistent with some of concluding arguments here, the most important single cause generating increasing levels of poverty is the growth of in-work poverty and the ‘low-pay, no-pay cycle’ (Shildrick et al. 2012). According to the authors, by the late 1990s, over half of Canadian adult workers (6.7 million) were in employment situations that could be characterized as low waged and/or insecure. It is in this context the authors argue that crime is an ‘individualistic’ response to relative deprivation, by which they mean when poverty is experienced as unfair when compared to someone else better off, generating discontent. In a rudimentary sense, poverty is linked to crime when rising crime rates fuel fear of crime, which in turn isolates, segregates, and excludes people perceived as residing in high crime areas, and there gathers a more general avoidance of public space. Our review (Webster and Kingston 2014a) showed that not every study has found a relationship between poverty and property and violent crime in urban areas. While not underestimating some of the methodological problems in uncovering this link, Dekeseredy et al. (2003: 14) are confident these have been sufficiently overcome to be able to conclude from their review of the literature, and from their own empirical study, ‘that urban poverty and joblessness are major determinants of urban crime.’ Returning to evidence about the crime-poverty-inequality link in the UK, the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime (ESYTC, see McAra and McVie 2010) found that serious youth offending is linked to a broad range of vulnerabilities and social adversity found among children and young people. The Edinburgh study found that for girls in particular, coming from a socially deprived background (parents in manual work or unemployed) lay the conditions for, and joined other vulnerabilities, as well as other factors such as weakened social bonds seen in poor (in terms of resources to cushion crisis) parenting and school failure, that differentiating violent and non-violent young people. They concluded (against adverse early prediction and intervention) that there is a danger that early targeting of children and families may

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serve to label and stigmatize these individuals and thereby create a selffulfilling prophecy.

Unbalancing Welfare and Punishment: Establishing the Poverty–Crime–Policy Link in Europe Farrall and colleagues (2010) correctly argued that the way in which British society views offenders of any age has changed towards a harsher, more punitive stance, less forgiving, and less understanding of the adverse individual and social conditions some offenders may face. The alternative implications for social and welfare policy, according to the authors is to develop the ‘capabilities’ of individuals who would, if they could, stop offending. That poverty can preclude such choices and possibilities is most marked where economically marginalized groups are made to feel shame, because they are in severe material need. They go on to point to radical reform in welfare, education, housing, and employment policy, and the strengthening link between unemployment and crime between 1950 and 2006. They point to how the thrust of 1980s housing policy reform led to a steep increase in the rate of inner-urban crime, through the concentration and ghettoization of myriad social and personal problems in the residuum of remaining social/public housing estates or areas of estate, as the better housing was privatized. However, social security reform, too, has been linked to changes in the crime rate. Farrall and Jennings (2012) directly link changes in the economy to changes in crime in their historical analysis of welfare and justice reform. More generally, the literature suggests that lagging and coincident indicators of economic conditions, such as unemployment rate, income inequality, GDP, and consumer sentiment, contribute to increased rates of property crime either through producing need and hence criminal motivation, or through the relative availability of ‘stealable’ goods and commodities. The impact of economic conditions on crime is shown by the author’s own time series data. We can add that most recently, it is the growth of poor and insecure work brought by changes in the labour

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market that may have had a greater impact on crime rates (Hale 1998). Farrall and Jennings (2012: 481) conclude that ‘Changes in national crime rates (and in particular property crimes, representing a large proportion of the overall level of crime) can be linked to economic causes.’ Further, Farrall et al. (2014: 22) recently concluded that, …there is no denying that there was an overall rise in crime throughout the 1980s and into the first half of the 1990s. So whilst crime was rising before 1979, the rate of increase picked up after the early 1980s and further accelerated in the early 1990s. The steepest rises were in property offences and occurred during the 1980s and early 1990s, coinciding with sharp increases in the level of unemployment and inequality. Finally arguing that shifts in crime policies in the mid-1990s were the outcomes of changes which can be traced in various ways back to seemingly unrelated policy domains, for example, how housing policies, or social security, or unemployment might impact on crime rates. In effect, an earlier concern with increasing welfare spending and alleviating poverty was inversely replaced by a concern to increase law and order spending, over the whole period from 1983 to 2010. Table 1 next offers a summary of cumulative changes in welfare and work policy that have directly impoverished young people and young adults, which are the most crime-prone group and disproportionately generate volume property and violent crime. The periods at which policy changes are introduced and their effects on crime and youth poverty are meant to convey what has happened to working-class children, young people, and young adults as a result of a state welfare assault beginning in the early 1980s. It should be noticed that every single policy change and reform since has, almost without exception, had an adverse effect on the social and economic conditions of this group and their ability to live independently. On the occasions when policies, such as the Educational Maintenance Allowance, had a positive benefit on material and social opportunities and conditions, they were subsequently withdrawn. It is difficult not to conclude from this cataloguing of youth policy that the British state has systematically impoverished its working-class young citizens in ways in which all welfare, housing, and basic income rights have been withdrawn (see Kingston and Webster 2015).

Restoring the Crime-Poverty-Class Inequality Link     77 Table 1  UK welfare, work, and youth poverty 1980–2015 Period

Welfare and work policy change

1950s–1978

Most young people leaving school at From lowest ever recorded, crime quadruples whilst youth 15, then 16, found independence wage doubled and the real through work and were treated as value of unemployment benyoung adults efit steadily rose Real value of unemployment Before 1980, 35% of male schoolbenefit begins its long and leavers went into apprenticeships irreversible decline. Slow then and youth wages were protected. rapid rise in crime Yet in 1980 alone, youth unemployment rose more than it had in the previous 10 years put together Third of 16–24 year olds had Welfare assault on young people been unemployed for more began, e.g., those aged 18–20 than 6 months, and were living living at home had their Social in poverty. Crime increases. Security Benefit cut (the first cuts Until 1985 youth poverty was since the Welfare State began) the result of an explosion in youth unemployment Unemployed young people and Withdrawal of unemployment young adults generally became benefit for all under 18s; compulpoorer and independent sion to attend Youth Training living becomes difficult then for 2 years; lowering of Benefit impossible. Crime increases. rates for the under 25s and the After 1985 youth poverty and withdrawal of special payments; homelessness was due largely drastic curtailment of rent and rate to government policies rebates; compulsory 6-monthly job By 1986, the youth labour interviews for the unemployed market had collapsed, leaving with loss of benefit for those not a mixture of youth training attending; removal of the right to schemes, casual jobs or unemattend Further Education for up to ployment 21 h without losing benefit Earlier losses or reductions of income By 1997, 25% of households— especially children—were support and housing benefits for living in poverty, strongly 16- and 17 and 18–24-year-olds, associated with low-paid work were compounded by increased and unemployment. Between homelessness among those aged 1983 and 1995 youth poverty 16–18, and corralled of poor young had worsened and widened people in the shrinking ‘social between the unqualified and housing’ sector qualified Unemployment Benefit re-titled Jobseeker’s Allowance was lowered again for those aged under 25 years in 1995

1978–1984

1983–1984

1985–1987

1988–1995

Crime and poverty effects

(continued)

78     C. Webster Table 1  (continued) Period

Welfare and work policy change

1997–2008

Introduction of Working and Family Tax Credits introduced to alleviate child and pensioner poverty, and poverty among working parents with children Education Maintenance Allowances (EMAs) introduced in 2004 were particularly successful in encouraging poor boys living in urban areas to stay at school/FE post-16 Caused by excess lending to the private sector and lax regulation of financial services NDYP (New Deal for Young people), Young Persons Guarantee (YPG) the Future Jobs Fund (FJF—both this and YPG introduced 2009 by previous government) and EMA all improved quality job chances of poor young people aged 16–24. Evaluations concluded that the largest impact improving the destinations of young people was on poor families and young men

2008–2010 recession

2010–2014 ‘Austerity’

Crime and poverty effects

While reducing child poverty and benefiting parents with children, poverty rates for working-age adults without children had reached record levels by 2002/2003 Since the mid-1990s one-third of 16–24-year-olds have suffered poverty compared to a fifth of older working-age adults Unlike earlier recessions, when very rapid, very high and long-term unemployment rates saw delayed then dramatic increases in crime rates, the 2008 recession has seen far fewer job losses and the beginnings of improvement only 5 years on Poor children are now twice as likely to come from a working home than from a home without work, poverty fell in the initial stages of the recession (because of plunging average incomes and family tax credits), but new jobs are poor quality and insecure Sixteen to 24 year olds however, New Coalition Government withhave faced the highest rates drew the FJF, EMAs and weakened of unemployment, redundancy NDYP; Welfare Reform Bill (2011) and decline in employment. greatly increased the severity and Although unemployment is amount of benefit penalties and now falling quickly for young sanctions placed on claimants aged adults under 25 years old; removal of There are 1.7 million young housing benefit for unemployed people aged 16–24 living in people aged 18 to 21; unemployed ‘low-income’ households and, 18–21-year-olds to claim a youth of these, 1.1 million are single allowance with strict conditionaladults without children—a ity; minimum wage denied to much greater proportion than under 25 year olds. All inevitably for older age groups. This increasing poverty and homelessis the only group to see an ness for this group increase in its poverty rate Striking reductions in pay among young men and young adult males

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Following on from this UK case study, international comparisons offer another way into understanding changing patterns and levels of social welfare systems, particularly in respect of supporting children’s and young people’s transitions (Anxo et al. 2010). Across jurisdictions, social welfare systems clearly vary in the effectiveness of their support for different groups, according to class, gender, age, and generation. Anxo et al. (2010) from a European perspective note that social welfare systems are particularly needed at key life junctures in addition to or instead of childcare, employment, or the family. In particular, preparing for and entering work, setting up independent households, surviving interruptions to work. Anxo et al. (2010) examined support arrangements for youth transitions in nine European countries. Noting the profound changes to individualism, work instability, postponement of family formation, new lifestyles, and changes in values, and norms effecting male and female life cycles have increased critical biographical events, instability, and risk. Nowhere has this become more apparent than at teenage and young adulthood in respect of school to work transitions and the possibility of independent living. Their comparison of varieties of capitalism and welfare states produces different degrees of the residualization of children and young people from poorer families. It is therefore apparent that financial support in respect of parents is a key differentiator between counties in the context of a more general increase in precarious youth employment across all the comparative countries. Much of this, as is well known in the UK, is the outcome of the degree of stratification of education and training systems leading to labour market entry, and the degree to which vocational education is held in low esteem (for example in the southern European countries, France, Hungary, and the UK). Mass higher education systems in Europe, as Antonucci (2016) has amply shown, are no substitute for effective welfare, education, and training systems for all young people. Comparing different clusters of European regimes in terms of their balance between welfare and more punitive and/or laissez faire approaches to youth policy, Pemberton (2015) first emphasizes the

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importance of the international ratio of youth to adult unemployment rates, which has continued to increase so that divergences between say UK youth and adult unemployment rates are also replicated internationally. On this basis, Pemberton (2015, cited in Fergusson 2016) differentiates different regime types, which include ‘Neoliberal,’ ‘Liberal,’ and ‘Social Democrat’ corresponding as one would expect with, respectively, the UK, Ireland, the US, and three others in the first two groups, while the latter group comprises four Scandinavian countries. The Neoliberal regimes have by far the highest NEET levels in both the 15–19 and 20–24 age groups. The Social Democratic regimes have by far the lowest. The Liberal regimes are nearer to the Social Democratic ones for the younger age group, although not for the older group. And, of course, high NEET levels are closely associated with high levels of social and economic inequality more generally (Fergusson 2016). What this means in practice is that youth transitions from school and training to work in Germany (using work schemes and skill centres that make the young ‘work ready, and so-called ‘flexible’ contracts) helps produce the lowest youth unemployment rate in Europe—with Upper Bavaria having just 3.4% while Italy’s Calabria region has a rate of 65%. The youth unemployment figures in the Mediterranean countries fail to reveal a huge hidden economy that offers cash-in-hand work to young people (Kirchgaessner and Oltermann 2016). Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece have always assumed young people and young adults will live at home while they are educated and trained for the workplace. Currently however, in Italy around 80% of under-30s live in their parental home and the average age for achieving ‘economic independence’ or independent living is estimated at 35 (Kirchgaessner and Oltermann 2016). The unbalancing of welfare and punishment, including weak welfare support and protections and the criminalization of youth poverty, across European countries can be seen in a number of ways. Employment transitions can be too fast as occurs in the UK, Denmark, and Ireland, with the UK fastest but short lived in that transitions there are most likely to stymy after a spell of

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unemployment. They can be too slow as occurring in Spain, Italy, and particularly Greece, and there is a very high likelihood of being unemployed for 3 years or more within the transition period, usually with a remote chance of achieving any foreseeable independent living. In respect of supporting education and training transitions, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, and the Netherlands emphasize occupationally specific qualifications, the UK, France, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, and Sweden generalist qualifications. This contrasts markedly with Eastern Europe’s laissez faire, ‘sink or swim’ approach, consistent with US-style ‘hypercapitalism.’ In southern Europe, educational qualifications do not protect individuals from a prolonged period of unemployment. Although mass tertiary educational expansion has become associated not only with lower net returns to education overall, to the extent that Antonucci (2016) can talk of a ‘crisis in student lives’ as higher education shapes and deepens inequality and poverty experiences of European young people. This is less the case in Germany than in the UK and Spain, but an increase in the unemployment risks of the least qualified and minorities has occurred in all countries. The relatively recent European unemployment crisis resulting from the Eurozone and Global Financial Crisis has greatly increased divergence between northern and central countries, and the southern periphery, particularly the increase in long-term youth unemployment. There is very substantial underemployment too, with 31% of young people on part-time contracts and 42% on temporary contracts across the EU member states. Most of these contracts (86% in 2012) were held by those with low-to-medium level education and, generally speaking, there has been a polarization of the job market happening across Europe. The conditions that facilitate young people and young adult’s successful transitions to work vary nationally, so that in Germany and Denmark, they are related to quite early vocational specificity and specialization, in the UK and Ireland with low employment protection. Perhaps, decisive importance has been different countries’ reactions to the Eurozone crisis in 2009. The extremely high levels of youth unemployment in some EU members can be explained by on the one

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hand, a distinctively Mediterranean model of very low social spending accompanied by very low unemployment benefits, inherited from recent authoritarian histories. On the other hand, some Eastern European member states also stand out as having been hit very hard by the financial crisis. At the same time, it is worth noting that the UK shares this characteristic of relatively low social spending compared to some other EU member states. Taking into account the unbalancing of welfare and punishment in the UK and across the EU member states, how do we theorize this generalized crisis of youth poverty, which we have seen, can be connected to delinquency and crime. Walther and Plug (2006) have characterized contrasting national welfare and work transition regimes in terms of ‘universalistic’ (Nordic countries), ‘liberal’ (UK and Ireland), ‘employment-centered’ (Germany, France, and the Netherlands) and ‘sub-protective’ models (Italy, Spain, and Portugal). The main point to make is that the primary reason for the crisis is not economics but politics, and more particularly the balance that is struck between welfare, individualistic, and punitive approaches to child and youth policy. Nordic countries, take a universalistic approach in which general and vocational educational pathways lead most (80%) school leavers to higher education, if they so choose. It is accompanied by a national system of educational and training standards, flexible enough to allow for individual learning and training plans. This universalistic approach is paralleled in welfare, where the relation between individual rights and responsibilities is embedded in collective social responsibility and social solidarity. Linked to citizenship status, the right to social assistance applies to young people from 18 years old regardless of the socioeconomic situation of their families. In contrast to more neoliberal regimes, counselling is widely institutionalized throughout all stages of education, training and transition into employment, and is primarily orientated so as to reinforce individuals’ motivation for personal development. The UK’s contrasting liassez faire approach involves an initial (often unreliable) investment to prepare individuals through compulsory

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schooling, after which young people are conceived as ‘entrepreneurs’, taking responsibility for their own work destiny. Individual rights and responsibilities are valued more than collective provisions based upon social solidarity. Welfare transitions in the UK reflect this same ethos of taking self-responsibility for one’s own transition outcomes, while the jobseeker’s allowance for those without work is tied to citizenship status, the level of benefits is low, and increasingly limited in time and conditional upon active job search. Finally, ‘sub-protective transition regime’ applies primarily to the southern European countries, such as Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Here, the low percentage of standard work arrangements and the high rate of unprotected living conditions have created a specific ‘dualistic’ welfare regime in which the family and informal work play a significant role. Fergusson (2016: 75) summarizes the effects on young people of cumulative and the most recent dismantling of welfare entitlements in the UK and arguably across other European countries as ‘the crisis of non-participation’ (in society) thus, …progressive displacement onto patents and carers of the costs of young people’s loss of financial support from the state. The combined effect of changes in welfare provision and the legislation requiring participation is to define official recognition of non-participation out of existence, despite its evident mass endemic presence. Those 16–17-yearolds whom the state deems sufficiently vulnerable to be classified as minors for the purpose of the criminal justice system now enjoy fewer rights of welfare protection than adults. Obversely, 18–24-year-olds who are subject to the full force of the law no longer have full rights to be enabled to subsist independently as the equal of adults—the age threshold of which has shifted incrementally, unacknowledged and undebated, to 25.’ Non-participation of young people in this context means ‘living and surviving out of sight of systems which record all recognized forms of economic and educational participation.’ (not in employment, education or training or NEET). Going on to discuss the connection of these policy effects to crime, Fergusson (2016) argues that any empirical links in themselves are insufficient bases to establish

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a causal link between non-participation, unemployment and crime. Rather, there needs to be an explicit theorization of the connections between them, based to begin with, in close-up qualitative studies. Summarizing these studies across Europe, Fergusson (2016) shows that young people’s experiences of deprivation were more strongly related to offending when they were most resentful of and angered by its consequences—particularly one might add, its negative consequences on status and esteem, despite a strong work and/or entrepreneurial ethic (see Qasim 2017). It is this subjective interpretation of poverty experiences that matters. Fergusson (2016) rightly concludes that poverty experiences can influence an admixture of instrumental and expressive motivations for crime. Even if the welfare–crime relationship is clearer in terms of financial and other pressures on young people, seen in the correlation of reduced welfare provision under extreme financial duress with increased offending, particularly in relation to serious and violent crime, but with property crime too (Farrall and Jennings 2012), causality is difficult to establish. The best that can be said according to Fergusson (2016)— which is one of the best sustained analyses and reviews—is that the youth poverty and crime relationship through being governed, criminalizes youth poverty and the poor youth population to a remarkable degree (see Kingston and Webster 2015). Indeed, evidence from the International Self-Report Delinquency Study has consistently found that across European countries, formal police responses to delinquency was most likely in the Anglo-Saxon cluster of countries (United Kingdom and Ireland). It appears that the willingness of the police and the criminal justice system to criminalize delinquency rather than any particular propensity towards, or greater prevalence of, delinquency between countries and country cluster is a marked feature of the Anglo-Saxon countries and the neoliberal cluster in Europe and beyond (Junger-Tas et al. 2003, 2010).

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Discussion and Conclusion: Crime, Poverty, and Class Inequality Over the last two decades, for the first time, there have been particularly striking improvements in the attainment of poorer and minority children and young people in London’s schools, compared to the rest of England. Further, the reason is said to be London’s ethnic diversity and the benefits of higher educational aspiration among children because they are the children of immigrants, and great improvements in London schools. And yet, differences in educational performance between boys from poor and affluent neighbourhoods generally remain very large. By age 19, only a third of poor young people achieve the equivalent of two A-levels compared to nearly two-thirds who are not poor. Ethnic diversity can nevertheless, in certain circumstances and conditions, override class disadvantage. The evidence appears to show, however, that the differences in social and economic outcomes between the more and less advantaged within each ethnic group are much greater than differences between ethnic groups (Hills et al. 2010; Hills 2015). The Hills Report (2010) explored how socio-economic inequalities interact with other factors such as gender, ethnicity, religion, and age, revealing patterns of socio-economic inequality having a striking concentration of inequality at the top end of the scale. In other words, class (in the sense of objective economic position) is a much more powerful determinant of life chances than any other variable, including gender and ethnicity. There are already clear differences in assessments of 3 and 5-year-old children’s vocabulary, school readiness, conduct, and ­ hyperactivity, depending on their parent’s incomes. Parental resources, b­ehaviour, and parenting style may differ, effecting child development, but the biggest gaps in development are those between no parent in work and both working; parents in poverty and those who were not; those in lone-­parent and two-parent families; mother’s education and English

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language skills. Differences between children from poorer and other families persist all the way through school. Of all these factors, the effects of class and family income level on attainment are strongest, especially among British children compared to elsewhere. However, differences relating to family background have been falling and the life chances of poor children have improved compared to the past. The huge surge in overall prosperity between 1959 and 2009 masks the uneven distribution of the gains such that the very poor have not done well; the poor have made substantial gains; some in the middleincome groups have made big gains, some not; and the wealthiest have made stratospheric gains (Hills et al. 2010; Hills 2015). This leads to and reinforces a social class structure that even criminologists are reluctant to discuss as an analytical framework for understanding the crime problem. After all, many people do not see themselves as belonging to any kind of class (Savage 2015), so how can we talk about the relevance of class for discussions of policing, criminal justice, crime, and diversity? Part of the problem is we tend to limit discussions about class on differences between the middle and working classes when we should really be focusing on the growing extremes of wealth and poverty that polarize society (Dorling 2014; Sayer 2015). For class distinctions to exist in any meaningful way economic advantages afforded by income and wealth have to be accumulated, endure, and inherited over time. The ensuing distinctions carry moral and cultural characteristics as well as influence so that individuals may feel ‘entitled’ or ‘dominated.’ Certain cultural tastes and preferences associated with educational qualifications, which welleducated parents pass to their children, are seen as more ‘superior’ than others (Savage 2015). So, for example, individuals labelled and stereotyped by others as ‘Chavs’ are seen as variously ‘vulgar,’ ‘rough,’ ostentatious, violent, unemployed, and probably criminal (Jones 2016). Well-educated people in contrast to those unlike themselves, feel confident in dealing with institutions and authority, in advancing their cause and being assertive, including their dealings with the police and the courts. A sense of class entitlement and cultural values are the outward markers of an underlying social

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divide between a small, wealthy elite pitted against a ‘precariat’ of poor, insecure, often younger people at the bottom, lacking social networks and opportunity (Savage 2015). ‘Precariat’ because this growing group is identified by its main characteristic, living consistently precariously compared to other groups. It has by far the lowest income, is likely to rent property, has few social ties, with few associates in high-status occupations. The precariat tends to be segregated and stuck in the poorest places, receives the greatest attentions of the police and the criminal law, and from whence most police suspects and court defendants are drawn. Savage’s (2015) estimates are that the elite at the top is about 6% of the population and the ‘precariat’ at the bottom consists of about 15% of the population. Whether we speak of the wealthy elite at the top or the precariat at the bottom— classifications generate categories of people which are morally loaded and set in a hierarchy of worth, stereotypes, and status (Savage 2015). In direct contrast to the position of the precariat, the rich elite might be seen as both above the law, and not coincidentally, making the law to suit their own interests and maintains their privileges (Sayer 2015). Rich elites engage in a whole range of dishonest practices from laundering drug money and tax evasion to miss-selling mortgages and insurance, but many of these harmful practices are not officially criminal nor subject to the criminal justice process (see Webster 2017). This chapter has attempted to restore the sort of Crime–Poverty– Class Inequality framework summarized and begun in the concluding discussion. The chapter has focused on how the lives of children and young people have been impoverished and made precarious over decades of imbalanced policies that have substituted punishment while withdrawing welfare support from children and young people, their Carers and families. As a consequence, we have seen soaring youth crime rates which we are likely to see once again as the delayed effects of the Global Financial Crisis come to bite.

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References Antonucci, L. (2016). Student lives in crisis: Deepening inequality in times of austerity. Bristol: Policy Press. Anxo, D., Bosch, G., & Rubery, J. (Eds.). (2010). The welfare state and life transitions: A European perspective. Cheltenham: Edgar Elgar. Arnett, J. J. (2015). Emerging adulthood: The winding road from the late teens through the twenties (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Child Poverty Action Group. (2017). Child poverty fact and fiction. http:// www.cpag.org.uk/child-poverty-facts-and-figures. Choongh, S. (1998). Policing the dross: A social disciplinary model of policing. British Journal of Criminology, 38(4), 623–635. Davis, N. (2016, December 12). High social cost adults can be predicted from as young as three, says study. The Guardian. http://gu.com/ p/5f6ah?CMP=share_windows_mail. DeKeseredy, W, S., Alvi, S., Schwartz, M. D., & Tomaszewski, A. E. (2003). Under siege: Poverty and crime in a public housing community. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Dorling, D. (2014). Inequality and the 1%. London: Verso. Farrall, S., & Hay, C. (2010). Not so tough on crime? Why weren’t the thatcher governments more radical in reforming the criminal justice system? British Journal of Criminology, 50, 550–569. Farrall, S., & Jennings, W. (2012). Policy feedback and the criminal justice agenda: An analysis of the economy. Crime Rates, Politics and Public Opinion in Post-War Britain, Contemporary British History, 26(4), 467–488. Farrall, S., Gray, E., Jennings, W., and Hay, C. (2014). Using ideas derived from historical institutionalism to illuminate the long-term impacts on crime of ‘Thatcherite’ social and economic policies: A Working Paper, ESRC Grant Long-term Trajectories of Crime in the UK (Working Paper No 1). Sheffield: University of Sheffield. Fergusson, R. (2016). Young people, welfare and crime: Governing non-participation. Bristol: Policy Press. Gash, T. (2016). Criminal: The truth about why people do bad things. Milton Keynes: Allen Lane. Gronqvist, H. (2011). Youth unemployment and crime: New lessons exploring longitudinal register data. Stockholm: Stockholm University, The Swedish Institute for Social Research. www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:408248/ FULLTEXT01.PDF.

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Hale, C. (1998). Crime and business cycle in post-war britain revisited. British Journal of Criminology, 38(4), 681–698. Hallsten, M., Szulkin, R., & Sarnecki, J. (2013). Crime as a price of inequality? The gap in registered crime between childhood immigrants, children of immigrants and children of native swedes. British Journal of Criminology, 53(3), 456–481. Hills, J. (2015). Good times, bad times: The welfare myth of them and us. Bristol: Policy Press. Hills, J. et al. (2010). An anatomy of economic inequality in the UK: Report of the national equality panel (Government Equalities Office, 457pp), January 2010. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/28344/1/CASEreport60.pdf. Junger-Tas, J., Marshall, I. H., Enzmann, D., Killias, M., Steketee, M., Gruszczynska, B., et al. (Eds.). (2010). Juvenile delinquency in Europe and beyond: Results of the second international self-report delinquency study. London: Springer. Jarjoura, G. R., Triplett, R. A., & Brinker, G. P. (2002). Growing up poor: Examining the link between persistent childhood poverty and delinquency. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 18, 159–187. Jones, O. (2016). Chavs: The demonization of the working class (2nd ed.). London: Verso. Junger-Tas, J., Marshall, I. H., & Ribeaud, D. (2003). Delinquency in an international perspective: The international self-reported delinquency study (ISRD). Monsey: Criminal Justice Press. Kingston, S., & Webster, C. (2015). The most ‘undeserving’ of all? How poverty drives young men to victimisation and crime. Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, 23(3), 215–227. Kirchgaessner, S., & Oltermann, P. (2016). Germany is clear winner in EU fight to find jobs for the young. The Observer, 11 September 2016. Lareau, A. (2000). Home advantage: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education (Updated Edition). Oxford: Roman & Littlefield. Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. Berkeley: University of California Press. McAra, L., & McVie, S. (2010). Youth crime and justice: Key messages from the Edinburgh study of youth transitions and crime. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 10(2), 179–209. Nilsson, A., Backman, O., & Estrada, F. (2013). Involvement in crime, individual resources and structural constraints: Processes of cumulative (dis) advantage in a Stockholm birth cohort. British Journal of Criminology, 53(2), 297–318.

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Pemberton, S. (2015). Harmful societies: Understanding social harm. Bristol: Policy Press. Putnam, R. D. (2015). Our kids: The American dream in crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster. Qasim, M. (forthcoming. 2017). Young, Muslim and criminal. Bristol: Policy Press. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. London: Harvard University Press. Savage, M. (2015). Social class in the 21st century. Milton Keynes: Pelican Books. Sayer, A. (1992). Method in social science: A realistic approach (2nd ed.). Abingdon: Routledge. Sayer, A. (2015). Why we can’t afford the rich. Bristol: Policy Press. Shildrick, T., MacDonald, R., Webster, C., & Garthwaite, K. (2012). Poverty and insecurity: Life in low-pay, no-pay Britain. Bristol: Policy Press. Silva, J. M. (2013). Coming up short: Working-class adulthood in an age of uncertainty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skarðhamar, T. (2009). Family dissolution and children’s criminal careers. European Journal of Criminology, 6, 203–223. Verbruggen, J., Blokland, A. J., & van der Geest, V. R. (2012). Effects of employment and unemployment on serious offending in a high-risk sample of men and women from ages 18 to 32 in the Netherlands. British Journal of Criminology, 52(5), 845–869. Walther, A., & Plug, W. (2006). Transitions from school to work in Europe: Destandardization and policy trends. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2006(113), 77–90. Webster, C. (2017). Diversity and the criminal justice process. In J. H. G. Mair (Ed.), An introduction to criminal justice. London: Sage. Webster, C., & Kingston, S. (2014a). Poverty and crime review, full report. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Available, http://www.research.lancs. ac.uk/portal/en/publications/poverty-and-crime(43b93c2f-afe3-4872-898f7cca17518a51)/export.html. Webster, C., & Kingston, S. (2014b). Poverty and crime. In Reducing poverty in the UK: A collection of evidence reviews (pp. 148–152). York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Available, https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/reducingpoverty-uk-collection-evidence-reviews. Wright, B. R. E., Caspi, A., Moffitt, T. E., Miech, R. A., & Silva, P. A. (1999). Reconsidering the relationship between SES and delinquency: Causation but not correlation. Criminology, 37, 175–194.

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Author Biography Colin Webster  is Professor of Criminology at Leeds Beckett University. He is a British Academy Book Prize Winner for ‘Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low Pay, No Pay Britain’ (Policy Press 2012). He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the ‘British Journal of Criminology’. He serves as an advisor/consultant to the Youth Justice Board and major research projects.

Two Accounts of Censure Anthony Amatrudo

Introductory Remarks I previously juxtaposed the normative from the ideological use of the term censure. In recent times, the former has been especially associated with von Hirsch (1993) and the latter with Sumner (1994). I was fortunate to have been the pupil of both men. Andrew was tall, rather dashing, had a rapier-like mind, and his analytical flow was never once compromised by his pronounced stammer. In Andrew’s aristocratic presence, one always felt like his charisma, and intellectual heft, could either guide you along the way or swat you like a fly: he is an extraordinary man. Colin was short, jolly, very Northern, very working class and seemingly at war with social convention. Colin was also very continental and taken, at that time, by the great figures of Foucault and Gramsci. I never understood Colin as a criminologist as that label seems

A. Amatrudo (*)  Middlesex University, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_4

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far too limiting given the breadth of interests and the sheer ambition of his work. I understood Colin as a social theorist in the sense that is used in France or Italy. In any case, these two men have always remained my intellectual inspirations. My earlier dalliance with Classics and Theology gave me the tools to inhabit the texts Andrew pointed to, and my politics made me a willing neophyte to the sort of work Colin was pioneering. In this essay, I will revisit my earlier discussion and set out my own view of censure. My aim is to show that whilst the work of normative and analytical legal scholars on censure continues to animate academic research, the ideological use of censure has rather waned. This is not to say that ideological use of censure has nothing to offer Criminology because it may well. My claim will be that the ideological use of censure is not about criminological themes very much but about a claim within Marxist social theory, a shibboleth if you like, about meta-claims concerning history and economics and a contention that this shows up in: “…categories of denunciation and abuse” (Sumner 1990, 28). One account claim aims to be a scalpel, the other an axe, and neither tool may be usefully swapped. They ask different questions about different things and, in any case, start from different places. One springs from the idealism of Kant, the other from the materialism of Marx.

A Normative Account: The Idealised World Our morality is conditional, and this conditionality is best exemplified by the fact that agreements are only ever fully binding on individuals, as moral injunctions, when a prior security condition is fulfilled. Moreover, that agreement between persons should only be understood as morally normative when the self-interest of all those who co-operate are undertaken from a standpoint of impartiality. This standpoint of impartiality is itself an existential commitment that expresses the autonomy, and moral potential, of all those engaged in such agreements. The upshot of such a stance is surely that whenever individuals reject such a co-operative arrangement, their moral ties fall away and we are left to contend with the state of nature. Therefore, whenever individuals threaten the relationships of mutual cohesion, and co-operation,

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that pertain, between members of the community, coercion may well be required to uphold the co-operative endeavour that benefits all. I understand coercion as simply the institution that maintains the freedom and property against the non-co-operators. In this sense, there is no equivalent in punishment since those who place themselves outside of the system of co-operation also place themselves outside of morality (Charvet 1995). The free-rider may be understood as assaulting the values of the community, and the coercion that is meted out is understood as simply the institution that expresses the disdain of the rejection of the community’s values. On this reading, the community is essentially made up of the wills of the persons that commit to co-operate on grounds that would be agreed in an Original Position. This agreement and the actions that flow from it are binding on all persons and free-riding cannot be tolerated as that would upset the stability of the community and its relationships of mutual cohesion, and co-operation, and its collective notion of the good. If we did not distinguish between free-riders and co-operating members of the community, then we would jeopardize the bonds that keep the community together, notably in terms of the sense of the justice that apply equally to one and all. The way individuals are formed, as members of a community, is the outcome of both his coming to understand herself as a member of a community and his sense that this also entails a will to coerce those who claim the advantages that come with membership of the community whilst failing to regulate their own action and interests, in line with an ethic of mutual cooperation. In this essay, I shall not concern myself with free-riders that do not claim membership of the community but only those that do. When individuals forego the system of mutual co-operation with others and leave the moral space of the collective, the community seems reasonable in coercing them, if only for its own defence. Note here that I am using the term coercion, not punishment. Punishment would be subject to limitations. It will be interesting to consider the case where the community itself falls short of its own duty to uphold relationships of mutual cohesion and co-operation and this is a problem I will return to in this essay. My position is simply that the community’s network of relationships of mutual cohesion and co-operation will always have what is

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technically called an “assurance problem” and that when persons breach the contracting duty to recognise a system of mutual co-operation and respect that coercion is allowable (Byrd 1989). Yet, the institution of coercion can produce unwanted results in terms of fairness and proportionality. The issue is that if all that is desired is that the assurance problem is the only rationale for the institution of punishment, then there need not be any reason to maintain an ethic of proportionality. As Rawls stated the issue is merely one of public confidence. In other words, the usefulness of any given punishment should only be considered in terms of ability to reassure the community, not in terms of justice as such and that “the general belief in efficacy” is the key factor (Rawls 1971, 270). Before making any more progress, we need to revisit the issue of choosing an Original Position. Persons in the Original Position would choose coercion to surmount the assurance problem, and in so doing they would will morally binding principles. The crux of the issue is that whilst this might be so the way in which coercion is instituted (i.e. its distribution and amount), it is doubted that this will be compatible with the aspiration for justice. Of course, those in the Original Position are not fixated upon the assurance problem and are more taken with general equality and so coercion, if chosen, would apply to everyone not just a few. Thus far, we have only thought in terms of justified coercion and that falls somewhat short of a theory of punishment.

Moral Punishment and Justifying Coercion The assurance problem is, as Feinberg long ago argued, the main rationale for the view that hard treatment has reprobative compulsion, as opposed to some version of expressivism (Feinberg 1965, 98). Although this is important to note, it falls somewhat short of a thoroughgoing justification of coercion. Of course, those consenting to coercion in the Original Position cannot just argue for coercion as the institution that satisfies a condition for security since this is not to see persons as having the capability to be moral. In other words, if an offender were, in fact, a member of a moral community to punish her to satisfy the

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assurance problem, he would use her as a means to satisfy others, and this is contrary to the most basic commitment made by the members of the community, i.e. to view one another as fundamentally equal. This line discounts that the individual is not a member of the community, and therefore, the community can forego respecting such a rationale. However, in consenting to a system of coercion those persons in the Original Position are duty-bound to consider the offender a full member of the community and, as such, expected to give her full, and equal, consideration and to consider her able to live in accord with the moral precepts of the community. He always has the capacity to live a moral life and offending does not affect this insight in any way. Coercion, set in such terms, not only considers those who offend as moral agents but understands that coercion is to be understood as the mechanism by which its imposition justified to them as integral to their capacity for moral agency and their own commitment to that. We note here that coercion, in such terms, is primarily about considering the offender as fully moral, and fully equal, though failing in this case to behave in accord with the community’s commitments, one to another. However, though such a moral conception of coercion is usefully rooted in the cooperative nature of the community, it falls short of what we might term a justification of punishment. By punishment, to mean, a legal remedy for an illegal action (Primoratz 1985). What has been outlined so far in terms of a model of community co-operation is not set in legal terms. I am assuming that the assurance problem itself establishes a requirement for hard treatment which is inevitably legal in nature. Punishment entails the assurance problem but it also, surely, entails some sort of expressive function, and therefore, it has a morally educative role in that it reaffirms the community’s will.

Connecting the Assurance Problem to the Amount of Punishment Ensuring that there is basic security is the main reason why hard treatment is advanced to meet the assurance problem. It is to use Hart’s terminology intrinsic to the general justifying aim. This approach we term

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expressivist in that it is future facing and has a preventive function in that it expresses the community’s wish that members refrain from such behaviour (von Hirsch 1990, 275–276). Rules imply the possibility of affecting member’s behaviour: they are future facing, as utilitarians have always maintained. It goes without saying that the form of hard treatment will always be dependent upon the society in question, and Hegel long ago argued that (Hegel 1967, 72).

Thinking of Punishment in Terms of Censure We think of the community as being grounded in the individual wills of persons contracting in the Original Position to agree norms. This mechanism must, on the one hand, relate reinforce both the self-interest of individuals and morality through a rejection of free-riding. Free-riding is at odds with co-operative relationships and to a proper understanding of self-interest, set in co-operative terms. The free-rider violates not simply the immediate victim but the entire community of which he is a part of. The primary purpose of censure is always the reaffirmation of the norms and agreements made in the Original Position that the criminal has breached. Primoratz has outlined this mechanism in terms of an: “(E)mpathic condemnation of the crime committed, punishment vindicates the law which has been broken, reaffirms the right which has been violated, and demonstrates that the misdeed was indeed a crime” (Primoratz 1989, 196). Censure has the effect of treating the criminal as a fully responsible member of the community since in reaffirming the norms and agreements made in the Original Position (i.e. the establishment of a morality) is the outcome of identity of personal and collective reasoning. We might think of censure, in these terms, as quite a reactive procedure. I merely maintain that censure, as an institution, is that procedure that claims persons have the potential for co-operation and realises that the individually censured individual must come to see that their offending (against the norms and agreements made in the Original Position) is really an offence against his own will and capacity for co-operation; and necessarily reject free-riding. One may contend that the offender demonstrably lacks the will to co-operate. This is to

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erroneously understand somebody who free-rides in one aspect of their lives necessarily free-rides in other aspects too; and that they lack the potential to co-operate. Censure is best understood as appealing to an offender’s capacity to co-operate and moral behaviour. It affirms their membership of the community. Censure is part of the cost of community membership and is a reminder to an individual of their personal moral responsibility and capacity to lead a moral life. In simply retributivist terms censure is consequentialist. It advances social cohesion through a relationship that revolves around an understanding that a particular action is wrong and how a given individual is responsible for it (von Hirsch 1990, 272). Antony Duff terms it a “moral discussion”, an iterative part of moral living in community: a challenge thrown down to the individual to respond to in moral terms (Duff 1986, 48). However, the main issue to note is that censure is intrinsic to punishment in, and of, itself and not simply as an aspect of the assurance problem. Therefore, we hold that if we were to use coercion on an offender in a morally neutral fashion whilst that might well satisfy the assurance problem, it would be inadequate as punishment. It would fail to afford the offender the status of a fully moral person in the sense that it only appeals to his self-interested reasons to desist in the future rather than present him with a moral basis for not acting as he did, as such. Moreover, such a model does not properly uphold the moral account of co-operation. In other words it fails to affirm the individual’s ability to bind their own pursuit of self-interest; instead it just affirms their means to pursue interest. The question is whether, or not, the offender wills their own punishment, as I believe that they do. Of course, in modern times, Ted Honderich has maintained that it does not since such a constructivist model affords insufficient space for consent (Honderich 1984, 219–227). Honderich’s point can be assuaged by stating that any subject can take up what we might term a reflective stance, i.e. that they may develop a moral disposition through engagement with the community’s best interests and reject attitudes and behaviours that fail to uphold the common good. This position deals with consent, not in terms of assenting to a single contract, but rather as an on-going process of affirming one’s moral status through a process of personal reflection and action. Charles Taylor outlines such a model in his seminal Human

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Agency and Language (Taylor 1985). Following Taylor I maintain that the claim to be moral is essentially about repudiating free-riding behaviour; and that this repudiation is what is visited upon individuals who free-ride, and that being their will. The standard objection here is that my position fails to understand that persons need not place themselves in an Original Position and who therefore never chose to be moral persons and accordingly never went on to will in the moral fashion that I have set out. I think this omits the everyday fact that we live in a relatively just society where people regularly reflect upon moral issues and typically reject dishonesty and theft, for example. It is upon this realisation that censure rests and aims to involve persons in an on-going discussion about their rational and responsible existence as part of a community, which in the strict sense is not consequentialist. The point is to get persons to reflect upon their behaviour even in a case where we have grounds for thinking that they are unlikely to do so. The political theorist Igor Primoratz has addressed this issue in relation to the infamous Nazi, Klaus Barbie. Primoratz maintained that Barbie still counted as an agent like everyone else. He did not disavowal co-operation, and he understood that his actions were condemned and it was of no account that he disregarded that condemnation (Primoratz 1989, 195–196). Every person in a just society consents to a life of moral co-operation. However, by consent it means not simply a single act but in terms of a rationale that combines self-interest and existential commitment wherein persons come to see their personal responsibility to uphold the moral environment of everyone. Of course, education can help persons realise that they have a responsibility for the moral environment they, and their fellow members, inhabit. Punishment is educative in that it holds the criminal solely responsible for their failure to act morally. In this sense, punishment can assist the development of morality and allow persons to become fully morally autonomous, i.e. a person who understands himself as solely responsible for his moral commitment to the community. This view was first expounded by Hegel whose view of punishment had a central role in the individual’s understanding of himself (Hegel 1991).

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The Educative Role of Punishment The point we must never lose hold of is that punishment reaffirms the outcome of the Original Position and that in asserting that which is wrong it underscores a form of moral education and imperative to live morally (Hampton 1984). The place of education, in regard to morality, has shifted markedly towards the legal sphere. It is law that lays down the parameters of what is, and what is not, acceptable. Law helps both to instil the moral weltanschauung and defend the penal settlement. This is not to say that law is all there is to social morality but does acknowledge that our morality is dependent upon law to the extent that law is the most obvious discernible example of a given society’s morality. This is not to maintain that law is simply the view of the “moral majority” (Devlin 1959). In short, law enshrines only the justified moral injunctions that are the outcome of reflective agreements between persons that support social equality. Law then is the product of a moral community, created out of the agreement of its members on a co-operative basis, both it also creates its members to the extent that through the process is circular to the extent that it both forms the individual and is the outcome of community agreement. Through punishment the community is forcing the individual to consider their personal moral choices and, secondarily, it reinforces the community’s agreed standard of behaviour. We note here that punishment satisfies the assurance problem but also has an expressive censuring function (Feinberg 1965). Punishment is more than censuring, but we cannot ignore its censuring role. Punishment has complex and two-fold rationale (von Hirsch 1990).

The Knotty Issue of Punishment: Hard Treatment and Blame There are problems when the assurance problem and level of assurance are not in harmony, e.g. the assurance problem may demand a relatively severe punishment but society may attach a moderate censure to it. We note this divergence between a relatively severe quotient

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of punishment and a low degree of societal censure in some forms of drug use or in overriding on trains. This may be because the outcome required is a general deterrence. There is nothing surprising in noting that deterrence and censure may stress different outcomes that show themselves in the penal system (von Hirsch 1990, 276–287). So why prioritise censure over prevention when determining punishments? One answer must surely be to deter solely through threatening with punishment is half-way to giving up on the notion that punishment should see individuals as moral members of the community, a point Armstrong made many moons ago. Harsh sentences may well prevent crime but are typically disproportionate and therefore unacceptable (Armstrong 1961). Overly harsh punishments surely also fail the test of equal consideration. Punishment, in my view, communicates to the offender and to the community, equally, exactly what has been done by way of a breach and what correct response is, in terms of the precise form of punishment. Duff sees punishment as a form of discourse with the offender concerning his actions, but we can broaden the range of that discourse to the whole community. “An offender’s punishment must be such that it appeals to, but does not coerce, his understanding and his will. It must be proportionate in its severity to the seriousness of his offence: only then can it communicate to him an adequate understanding of the moral character of his offence.” (Duff 1986, 278). Another answer for prioritising censure over and against prevention in determining punishments is that it would be disproportionate to harshly treat minor, though commonly occurring, offences and this would undercut the expressivist element in punishment and the educative role it has in underscoring that punishments are reasonable to the community. What if a particular activity was viewed as reprehensible though not especially serious and it was to be grossly punished? Then the expressivist would surely object that such a punishment would breach ordinal proportionality, i.e. the notion that individuals convicted of offences of a similar level of seriousness ought to be punished similarly, though allowing for the usual legal safeguards concerning mitigation and aggravation (von Hirsch 1990, 282). Therefore a prison sentence for littering would necessitate a similar sentence to, say, spitting. Here one may ask why persons should

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go along with such ordinal reasoning in regard to proportionality. The reason is obvious since if punishment is to express the community’s censure, then similar things ought to be censured similarly, although agreeing to what is similar may prove a more difficult activity than the model allows; moreover the censure may not necessarily be expressed in narrow legal terms. If, for example, there was no preventative basis in the community’s reasoning, then social stigma may be employed. Though the matter of stigma and at what level of intensity it is invoked as a measure of appropriate censure are akin to the matter of the criminal justice system where punishment is supposed to signify the level of appropriate censure (Scanlon 1988, 214). Another objection that the expressivist account maintains against unduly harsh punishments for minor crimes relates to the matter of cardinal proportionality. In von Hirsch’s words cardinal proportionality relates to: “… the overall magnitude and anchoring points of a penalty scale” (von Hirsch 1990, 282). In other words, it is about rank ordering crimes and their punishments in terms of seriousness: if you like, vertically. However, any crime, even a small one, could be used as the point around which the cardinal scale is set up. This is problematic since it may well conflict with the deeper moral assumptions about the importance of rights that we hold dear. For example, if a community were to tell an offender that although his offence was not very serious, they were nonetheless going to lock him up for several years, which would seem to conflict with cherished notions of liberty, and its value. It would undermine the values that punishment, as an institution, seeks to both affirm and instil. In von Hirsch’s account, “… it’s a bit like saying, ‘I’m not so upset, so I’ll only break your arm’” (von Hirsch 1990, 284). There is also a practical objection to harsh penalties for small crimes that relates to cardinal proportionality which is simply that if the punishment tariff for a small crime is the same as for a large one, then there is a real danger that offenders will choose the worse crime. We find such reasoning, perhaps, best expressed by Bentham who reasoned that punishments ought to induce a man to choose the least mischievous: “If any man have any doubt about this, let him conceive the offence to be divided into as many separate offences as there are distinguishable parcels of mischief that result from it. Let it consist for example, in a man’s giving you ten

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blows. If then, for giving you ten blows he is punished no more than for giving you five, the giving of five of these ten blows is an offence for which there is no punishment at all: which being understood as often as a man gives you five blows, he will be sure to give you five more, since he may have the pleasure of giving you these five for nothing” (Bentham 1789, 168). By itself such an objection is insufficient simply because one could always neutralize it by stating that there is no upper limit on the punishments being imposed. As Foucault showed us, long ago, in Discipline and Punish that humankind has an infinite capacity for devising and implementing appalling forms of punishment for its fellows (Foucault 1977, 3–5). In terms of the ideas being set out here this would not hold since an upper limit on punishments is set through the elaboration, and mixture, of educative and expressivist components and the fundamental moral character of punishment itself. This moral dimension is crucial since the formal requirements of both ordinal and cardinal proportionalities do not suggest the penalty scales by themselves; moreover they do not tell us what offences will, and will not, be the subject of the legal code. Such matters are largely determined in relation to the particular society in which they operate. What we need to underscore is that if there is a divergence between prevention and expression, then it is expression that must be prioritised. In terms of our moral life it amounts to the claim that agency and rights necessarily place limitations upon the sorts of penalties that could be understood as reasonable, and appropriate, as an expression of the community’s censure. The problematic relationship between prevention and expression can be readily resolved. The trickier problem is to defend the use of hard treatment, in public assurance terms, and the necessity to treat persons (offenders) as fully responsible beings.

The Relationship Between Hard Treatment, Coercion and the Need to Respect Agency I follow Duff in arguing that we ought to abide by Kant’s view about treating persons as not merely responsible but also autonomous agents (Kant 1964, 414). In the Categorical Imperative there is both a

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universal duty to respect the rights and interests of others as well as a rational requirement to abstract judgements from personal involvement and instead reflect upon the idealised viewpoint of an impartial judge. The Categorical Imperative sums up very basic moral insights into justice and allies them to a moral code that is morally intuitive, reasonable and therefore acceptable. Duff argues that since the Kantian position: “… rules out, as improperly coercive and manipulative, any kind of punishment which (whether by design or in fact) serves to beat, cow or manipulate the offender into submission, instead of communicating to him, and trying to persuade him to accept, the reasons which justify his punishment” (Duff 1986, 278). In that case the matter is not between forms of punishment that is hard and the requirement to censure proportionate to the crime, but rather between the use of hard treatment for the sake of prevention and the requirements of proportionality. Moreover, Duff takes a broader issue with deterrence when he writes: “(It) is still open to the objection that it does not show punishment to be consistent with a proper respect for the citizen as a rational and autonomous agent; that it still portrays punishment as an improperly manipulative attempt to coerce the citizen into obedience to the law” (Duff 1986, 186). I hold that Duff is only correct to object in this fashion towards purely deterrence-based rationales for punishment where the offender is rational and autonomous if this takes place within the bounds of a moral community; though I am not sure this is what Duff had in mind. Rather Duff argues elsewhere in Trials and Punishments that if we punish for preventative ends, we always coerce the offender, in the process, and that entails neglecting to treat him as either an equal or autonomous person (Duff 1986, 268–277). The view I detail is at odds with Duff’s largely because he is intent to: “… explore the implications of the Kantian demand that we should respect other people as rational and autonomous moral agents” (Duff 1986, 6). In this way, he awards his requirement the importance of an unconditional moral principle. This is why Duff cannot manage to resolve the matters of moral treatment and coercion and that is exactly the problem I highlight when countering Kantian, and impartialist theories generally. The moral theory I expound has at its heart the basic compatibility of coercion and moral censure on the grounds that

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prudential reason is a foundational element in moral reasoning. I have established that mutual coercion is an aspect of reason. Therefore we can convert justified coercion into moral punishment but only when the community itself allies the threat of coercion to an appeal to the moral will of the offender in terms of his understanding the justice of the punishment he is due. In this way there is no fear of neglecting the moral autonomy of offenders: since though the offender is coerced, he is coerced in terms of his membership of a coercive, though moral, community through prudential reason. It is a moral appeal and it is aimed at the offender realising his personal responsibility to once again live a life wherein his self-interest is tamed by a determination to once more live as an equal and autonomous, but co-operating, individual.

The Relationship Between Justice and Punishment This rationale for moral punishment realises that coercion is fully compatible with the autonomy of individuals as derived through the mechanism of the Original Position. This position necessarily reconciles the prudential reasons of persons and their moral perspective: in other words the morality, and coercion, that is imposed from without and the internal demand to live in accord with the notion of the strict equality of others. This reconciliation is helpful in uniting ideas about the consequences of punishment and the deservedness of punishments. What of punishment in unfair and unjust societies? Surely our society is more, or less, unjust. It is surely not straightforwardly fair. It certainly is not obviously Original Position derived. It seems two of my points fall in the real world. I have maintained that there is a necessary connection between cooperation and self-interest and that each person lives a wholly moral life and duly consents to rules agreed in an Original Position. Yet if the offender would actually be better off in a system outside of cooperation, then it is surely rational for him to place himself outside of such Original Position type agreements and into a state of nature relationship with his fellows. Moreover, it would be rational too for him to follow his own idea of the good independently

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of others. The more so when by following his unconstrained self-interest he is unlikely to be caught and prosecuted. If we determine he is not better off what are we to make of the idea that he has resolved to live morally with his peers? Of course, the community could use coercion and think of him as a potentially moral agent and explain this rationale to him in terms of their view of his fundamental equality. The explanation being related in broad terms that relate to resources and opportunities. The shortcoming of this reasoning is obvious to the offender and the community. The idealised view, of course, rests upon the principles of justice that support relationships of mutual cohesion, and co-operation, and a collective notion of the good. It could not claim to be meeting out moral punishment, and if it did, it would be hypocritical. One might argue that the entire practice of punishment in the UK and across the western world shows just how deeply the practice of retributive justice conflicts with distributive justice. It shows up communities without agreed norms and spaces where the notions of equality and power are rarely considered. Punishment seems not to be focused on communicating any expressive functions whatsoever. Coercion has no expressive function and therefore fails to be moral. All of this seems to place punishments in the real world, the world we actually inhabit, out with genuine moral life. Our experience seems to point to the way in which the ideal of moral punishment has slipped, and just how pressing the remodelling of present distributive justice is if ever retributive justice is to be defended in a world whose inequalities are structured through the operation of economic power and political indifference. Long ago Murphy made this point from an overtly Marxist perspective: “If we think that institutions of punishment are necessary and desirable, and if we are morally sensitive enough to want to be sure that we have the moral right to punish before we inflict it, then we had better first make sure that we have restructured society in such a way that criminals genuinely do correspond to the only model that will render punishment permissible” (Murphy 1973, 243). This is a salient insight and informs the second half of this essay that will focus on ideology.

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The Ideological Account: The Political Insight Let us begin by conceding that the ideological use of the term censure has a far deeper heritage within sociological and political theory and is largely absent in the literature on punishment. Censure is typically afforded a role in organising social structures and history and it relies on a notion of ideology, as opposed to some more abstract normative value. We note here that on this reading that censure has objective value. However, the ideological version of the censure also has its own problems. To what degree is any given censure ideological? What is the basis of ideological determination? Censure in the ideological account is really about an account of power rather than related back to a model of jurisprudential architecture or principle. It is typically rooted in traditional accounts of power as set out in Marxist scholarship. It is not so much the case that it is at odds with normative and liberal jurisprudence; rather it is focused on other things entirely.

Sumner and Power Sumner addressed the technical matter of censure, and censure generation, throughout the 1980s and became the pre-eminent scholar addressing censure theory within academic Marxist circles. His earlier work was concerned with the notion of ideology and mainstream deviancy theory, but this work was eclipsed by the 1990 collection Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice. The collection was a radical take on the so-called sociology of deviance focusing the attention of scholars towards the generation and institution of dominant social censures and understanding the criminal justice system as the outcome of dominant political and economic forces. The work was avowedly Marxist and revolutionary in that it advocated not only a wholesale abandonment of the hitherto leading forms of criminological analysis but the development of a new theory of social censures rooted in historical and sociological research. In any case, it argued criminology itself needed overhauling (Sumner 1990, 23–26). The new theory of social censures saw existing criminology as superficial, often statist and failing to note

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the deeper sources of both crime and social control. Sumner noted: “Whether we take their abstract, discursive definitions or their practical definitions in the course of law enforcement or moral stigmatization, it is clear that the definitions of deviant behaviour, even within a single society, exclude what should be included, include what should be excluded, and generally fail to attain unambiguous, consistent and settled social meanings. To this we add massive cross-cultural differences in the meaning, enforcement and even existence of categories of deviance, and endless instances of resistance to them involving alternative categories. Clearly, these categories are moral and political judgements that are highly acculturated and related to definite histories” (Sumner 1990, 26). The argument he advances is that there can be no possibility of using the typical categories of crime and deviance in a straightforward or even in a consistent manner and that it is a far better idea to treat them as moral and political discourses ripe for study. It is useful to see Sumner’s crime categories as simply negatively conceived ideological categories. This position notes crime categories as essentially linked to institutional forms and practices. This being the case it then follows that such categories arise only in certain places, at given times, and in relation to particular groups.

Marxism Traditionally Marxism has argued that crime categories are better understood as having a variety of hegemonic functions, such as signifying, denouncing and regulating both individuals and groups. Sumner was following in a tradition that saw the role of the police, the courts and other elements of the criminal justice system as predicted by the specific social, economic and political relations; in this case the capitalist mode of production. He understood the criminal justice system as, to some extent, upholding the interests of the capitalist class and the existing state of hegemony. He saw that social censures do not straightforwardly express a reality, or truth, about the nature and extent of crime but rather: “(A) world-view which had not come to terms with its repressed unconscious—the fear of women, blacks, radicals, the working

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class and the colonized” (Sumner 1994, 310). Like most Marxist theories a central role is given over to class. Class he focused on the notion of domination was expressed primarily in terms of class, but also race and gender. Therefore the powerful will invariably seek to maintain their control of power through the: “… capacity to assert its censures in the legal and moral discourses of the day” (Sumner 1990, 27). Accordingly, Sumner saw not just the police and criminal justice system in terms of this process but also the mass media. The media is part of an apparatus which supports dominant discourses and social practices. In other words, it reinforces those discourses and social practices that support the state are prioritised over those opposing voices. Mistakenly some critics have argued that Sumner was actually developing a version of the symbolic interactionist’s account and stressing the weight of labels, but this would be to neglect the fact that labels, per se, do not necessarily convey hegemonic force or ideological content. Furthermore, the labels used by symbolic interactionists are derived from another line of theory altogether; and here one might cite the American School of Pragmatism and philosophers such as John Dewey and William James and even Charles Sanders Peirce. Sumner is indebted to Marxist theory, specifically the work of Foucault and of Gramsci. Sumner clearly states that censures are different in kind from labels as are best understood as: “… categories of denunciation or abuse lodged within very complex, historically loaded practical conflicts and moral debates” (Sumner 1990, 27). Censure relates to broader, and deeper, issues of power, wealth and meaning, whereas social interactionism is not focused on such overtly political themes. In article written at the beginning of the first Thatcher government, “Race, crime and hegemony,” Sumner argued how the early 1980s was an important era for Marxism, in general, and Marxist Criminology in particular (Sumner 1981, 227–291). It was a period when the structuralist Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s was giving way to a version of Marxism that drew heavily upon cultural analysis. He famously noted how the sociology of deviance itself declined and ushered in a much broader view that saw beyond, and behind, the narrowly drawn crime categories of the courts and strived for a more holistic account of the Law in late modernity that related more directly to the lived experiences of people and the cultural phenomenon they observe.

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A Theory of Social Censure(S) Sumner is readily located in historical terms as his theory of social censures develops on earlier work undertaken on the ideological and cultural determination of power in the late 1970s, notably Policing the Crisis. The notion that the censure of black “mugging”, which had been elaborated in the UK press, was a major criminal threat to society was being pushed by the police without any substantial evidential basis. Stuart Hall et al. suggested the whole issue of “mugging” was not really about crime at all but rather it related to the political climate of the 1970s and the oppression of black youth in British cities. The main point is that for Hall et al. the censure of blacks, of the problem of “mugging”, essentially was really derived from the criminal justice system; rather it was better understood as an ideological phenomenon (Hall et al. 1978). Hall understood the black “mugger” as the scapegoat for much more profound issues of economics, history and a crisis in capitalism. The coverage of black “mugging” was actually a distraction from the deeper crisis in hegemony, not a crisis in law and order. By developing the work of Stuart Hall and other cultural theorists Sumner’s work should be noted as a dialogue with Criminology as a discipline. Sumner exploded the notion, which was then current in academic Criminology, that deviance was an unproblematic notion and therefore completely overlooked the differential experience of people and the lack of a genuine consensus around it. He maintained that deviance was, far from being any sort of objective measure or indication of public feeling, simply being read off the dominant moral code. In other words, deviance was little more than a deviation from a social convention set by the ruling class. This was a real problem because the supposedly objective measures of crime, deviance and difference were mixed up, confused and conflated, and far from being scientific categories to be employed in criminological analysis were actually subjective at best and at worst a distraction (Sumner 1994, 309–312). He noted how though the sociology of deviance had been progressive in so much as it had diverted attention away from issues of degeneracy and atavism and towards a Durkheimian concern for social regulation. However,

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he pointed out how: “…crime and deviance cannot be disentangled from the social facts of collective life” and therefore that criminologists need to understand the complexity, and historical determination, of the world as it truly is before moving on to undertake theoretical speculation (Sumner 2004, 29). One cannot underestimate the immensity of Sumner’s contribution. In detailing how: “… social censures combine with forms of power and economy to provide distinct and important features of practices of domination and regulation” he opened up Criminology at a time when it was rather closed-minded (Sumner 1990, 35). After Sumner criminological research sought to encompass a much wider field of study than it had hitherto. He gave criminologists and criminal justice professionals reason to ask new sorts of questions around the censures that operate within society and to proffer questions about their origin and role. Sumner moved matters away from the immediate issues that surround crime and Sumner gave us reasons to question the censures we commonly use and to ask questions about their origin and purpose. He pointed scholars away from the immediate issues surrounding crime and towards a contextualised analysis of crime and criminalisation which focused upon the role of censures. In doing this his radicalism is at once apparent. However, such an overtly committed position has often overlooked a great deal of empirical work. Moreover, his approach always teeters on the edge of discerning massive historic and political significance in mundane criminal activity or, if you like, seeing crime as merely an epiphenomenon of historical and economic forces rather than simple wrong-doing. My own view is that Sumner was, and remains, a revolutionary. As we enter the centenary year of the Russian Revolution (of 1917) I feel in many ways that Colin is a man born out of his time. His work on censure is at root an onslaught on the unfairness of a capitalist economy and the social relations that economy demands. When I left Cambridge and undertook a doctorate at the LSE I loaned my copy of The Sociology of Deviance: an Obituary to the late Prof. Brian Barry FBA. When Brian handed it back he said: “A first-rate history of ideas from your man, the insurrectionist.” That must be the last word.

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References Amatrudo, A. (2009). Criminology and political theory. London: Sage. Armstrong, K. G. (1961). The retributivist hits back. Mind, 70, 471–490. Bentham, J. 1789 [1982]. In J. H. Burns & H. L. A. Hart (Eds.), An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. London: Methuen. Byrd, B. S. (1989). Kant’s theory of punishment: Deterrence in its threat, retribution in its execution. Law and Philosophy, 8, 151–200. Charvet, J. (1995). The idea of an ethical community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Devlin, P. (1959). The enforcement of morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feinberg, J. (1965). The expressive function of punishment. The Monist, 49, 397–423. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Penguin. Hall, S., et al. (1978). Policing the crisis. London: Macmillan. Hegel, G. W. G. (1967). Hegel’s philosophy of right (T. M. Knox Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. G. (1991). Elements of the philosophy of right (H. B. Nisbet Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honderich, T. (1984). Punishment: The supposed justifications. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kant, I. (1964). Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. New York: Harper and Row. Murphy, J. G. (1973). Marxism and retribution. Philosophy and Political Affairs, 2, 3–11. Primoratz, I. (1985). Punishment and language. Philosophy, 64, 187–205. Sumner, C. S. (1981). Race, crime and hegemony. Contemporary Crises, 5(3), 227–291. Sumner, C. S. (1990). Censure, politics and criminal justice. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. S. (1994). The sociology of deviance: An obituary. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. S. (Ed.). (2004). The Blackwell companion to criminology. Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, C. (1985). Human agency and language: Philosophical papers 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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von Hirsch, A. (1990). Proportionality in the philosophy of punishment: From why punish? To how much? Criminal Law Forum, 1, 259–290. von Hirsch, A. (1993). Censure and sanctions. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Author Biography Anthony Amatrudo is currently Associate Professor of Criminology at Middlesex University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge and has been a Visiting Fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge and Cambridge and at the Max Planck Institutes for Law in Frankfurt and Freiburg and at the CEU in Budapest. He was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Nathanson Centre for Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security at Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto in 2012–2013. He is the author of ‘Criminology and Political Theory’ (Sage 2009) and ‘Human Rights and the Criminal Justice System’ (Routledge 2015). He was briefly Colin Sumner’s research assistant.

Anti-racist Criminology? Rod Earle

Introduction: Why Race? In two of the dominant Western democracies, the USA and the UK, 2016 was heavily marked by racial politics. Few people would deny that race was a dominant feature of the 2016 US presidential election. A white challenger to a black incumbent was itself unprecedented, but the background was provided by the black Lives Matter campaign protesting at the fatal neglect of black communities in the US and the lethal violence of their policing. Donald Trump emerged triumphant on the back of what some commentators referred to as a ‘whitelash’. In the UK, the successful Brexit campaign took a leaf out of Enoch Powell’s 1970’s racial rhetoric and “spoke straight—in its own metaphorical way—to the fears, anxieties, frustrations [of the white] national collective unconscious, to its hopes and fears” (Hall et al. 1978: 246).

R. Earle (*)  The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_5

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The referendum result shocked many, and revitalised concerns about how racism circulates under the surface, only to emerge to fuller public view during periods of particular political turbulence. In the 1970s Stuart Hall et al. were analysing how crime, race and policing were implicated in the configuration of a seminal political crisis. Since then crime has risen to, then receded from, the political frontline and race has almost ‘evaporated’ from mainstream political discourse (Goldberg 2009). So, what’s the bad news? The political consensus among white elites is that race is irrelevant. Because race does not exist at the biological level, and is thus unscientific, it is logically inconsistent to attribute harmful effects to it. The continuing, all-to-real, empirically unequivocal, distribution of harmful effects according to race (Phillips and Webster 2014) are thus relegated from social, economic and historical processes to the personal realm of sentiments, such as fear and anxiety. Racism is understood as a residual problem of atavistic, ignorant individuals failing to sufficiently modernise themselves; a personal defect to be exposed and condemned rather than a structural feature of society to be dismantled. In the rush to do away with the term ‘race’, a variety of competing terminologies, such as ‘implicit bias’ and xenophobia, focusing on fear of ‘foreigners’ or migrants, have drawn from concepts of ‘difference’ and ‘alterity’. They often do so as if this fear was a natural human propensity, an evolutionary and thus innate predisposition to be wary of ‘strangers’ that is hard-wired into us. This euphemistic strategy proceeds innocently enough without acknowledging that both concepts, difference and alterity, posit a normative (white, Eurocentric) state of being against which the ‘other’ or the ‘different’ stand out (Gilroy 2014a, b; Dussel 1995), usually with far from innocent or benign implications. Criminology is a discipline heavily implicated in racial projects (Parmar 2017; Smith 2014). This chapter will review some of these and reflect on the difficulties in developing critical currents that engage with and challenge the legacies and realities of race in the nexus of crime and justice. Drawing from the experience of researching race, ethnicity and identity in two men’s prisons in England (Phillips 2012; Earle and Phillips 2013; Earle 2016), it suggests there is a need to revisit race and

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re-present arguments that can challenge its enduring corrosive effects. In doing so, it seeks to ‘recall’ the concepts of anti-racism in the manner suggested by Hage (2016). The procedure of ‘recalling’ is based on the approach advocated by Latour (2007) as a way of enabling effective critical reflection on aspects of modern experience. It refers both to the process of memory as recollecting the past, but also to the procedures of commerce in which a manufacturing company might recall a product that has been identified as having a defect or being deficient in a way that can be remedied. The recall demonstrates a commitment to fixing the problem and returning it to its proper functioning. For some criminologists familiar with sentencing procedure, ‘recall’ will also be familiar as the process by which a prisoner released from custody is returned to their former state of incarceration because they may be at risk of disappearing while they continue to pose a risk of causing further harm. Perhaps this meaning is also appropriate, bringing ‘race’ back into view, and preventing its disappearance while there is still so much work to be done proving that it is has ceased to exist as a threat. The chapter proceeds on the basis that the currently widespread post/ non-racial presumptions are largely the privilege of white academics who have little to fear from racism, or for that matter, it seems, antiracism. Reconfiguring this status quo around race and anti-racism is an urgent task for as Gilroy (2014a, b: 27) warns: “[t]oday, religion and race are once again being fused back together. New conflicts and resurgent civilisation-ism are breathing life back into the oldest of racial imagery and invoking ethnicity once again in absolutist forms” (see also Earle and Phillips 2013). Establishing a viable, inclusive alternative to the exclusions accomplished by race over the past 400 years or more is, as Gilroy insists, no less than essential to the future of our species and our fragile place on the planet. The failure to do so comes with a heavy price. Race is not some peripheral historical ornament of modernity, or some thin layer of ideological dust that wafts away under the soft breath of liberal white disapproval. In the genocide against aboriginal people, the organisation of slavery, Indian reservations, the survival of apartheid in South Africa, Jim Crow in the USA and the exterminations camps of Nazi Germany,

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race has been a central, determining force. Many of its most extreme horrors are the stuff of living memory rather than ancient history. The centrality of race to academic disciplines and particularly to US politics can be gauged from Robert Vitalis’s (2015) recent exhumation of the history of America’s pre-eminent foreign policy journal, Foreign Affairs. Earlier in its history, the journal traded under the title Journal of Race Development and Vitalis exposes the way race was the dominant and determining conceptual framework for how the political establishment understood itself and America’s place in the world. As Pedersen (2016) puts it “Races, not states or nations, were considered humanity’s foundational political units; ‘race war’—not class conflict or interstate conflict—was the spectre preying on scholars minds”. Until the 1960s the only political party in the USA to oppose racial segregation was the Communist Party. White supremacy was not so much the stuff of the conspiratorial, lunatic fringe, but the implicit currency of mainstream politics (see also Appiah 2014). It ensured critical voices and black scholars were marginalised and excluded even as liberal disavowal of race began its ascendancy. Most recently, race has propelled the Christian right in the USA, the renewal of white supremacist groups, the electoral success of conservative Republicans and is heavily implicated in the presidential triumph of Donald Trump. It shapes patterns of housing throughout both the USA and the UK, and underpins the arrogance of Anglo-American foreign policy. Criminologists have a duty to account for why the institutions that are our principal concern—police, courts, punishments and prisons—are so heavily patterned by ‘the colour line’ (Du Bois 1903) of race. These powerful institutions are among the most, if not the most, racially marked social institutions of current times. They have become so as criminology has flourished. If criminal justice systems deliver pain (Ignatieff 1978; Christie 2004), how and why are they delivering these pains so heavily, so dependably, so enduringly and so disproportionately onto people who are black or brown (Wacquant 2009a, b, 2013)? What does criminology do to reproduce racism, and what can it do to build anti-racism are the questions this chapter tries to open to wider scrutiny.

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Gang Man Style In 2011 riots erupted across England. The immediate causal event was the shooting dead of a black man, Mark Duggan, by the police near his home in north London. The rioting in north London that followed a small protest against the shooting spread to south London, and then to other areas of the capital, and other cities where there appeared to be no identifiable spark for the protest. Shops were looted and trashed and fires set in what increasingly resembled an insurgency against deprivation, a carnival of incoherent reaction against austerity. As the fires died and the disorder faded, the police returned to the action. Thousands of people were arrested and a national reckoning played out across various forms of media as people tried to make sense of what had happened. David Starkey, an established, white TV historian and Cambridge academic appeared on the BBC’s flagship late-night commentary and analysis progamme, Newsnight. He promptly condemned the rioters in the following terms: what has happened is that the substantial section of the chavs… have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion.

As Phillips and Webster (2014) observe in their commentary on the episode, Starkey had not only presented the TV audience with the traditional racist stereotype of the predatory, alien, black interloper, he had also managed to weave in familiar fears of racial contagion. The white working class, the ‘chavs’, were being pulled into the vortex of black criminality and away from the elevating traditions of white English culture. Mindful of the stigma attached to professing racism, Starkey sought to clarify his terms: “so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country … It’s not skin colour, it’s culture…”. Starkey’s outburst perfectly captured the simultaneous disavowal of race and its deployment that is so characteristic of contemporary white anxiety over race. Starkey’s forthright manner of expression and habit of courting controversy are the reasons he gets invited in front of the cameras, but the

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‘us’ he speaks of has a familiar lamentable quality, of times past and lost, of being left behind. His ‘us’ is white-skinned, his unnamed cultural standpoint is ‘whiteness’—the accumulated cultural capital of certain ‘modern’, ‘civilised’ people. His demand on the same Newsnight programme for ‘plain talking’ rather than ‘evidence’ was a fateful precursor to the kind of visceral politics (Membe 2016) that was to be the characteristic quality of the 2016 Brexit campaigners. It is a toxic political cocktail composed of post-colonial melancholia (the sense of loss of international prestige and global influence that accompanies the passing of the British Empire), and the bitter sense of abandonment and neglect of post-crash austerity in the UK.

Race for Criminology In addition to race, Starkey’s comments also conjure with the founding figure of criminology—homo criminalis—criminal man. This is the seminal and central character of criminology, the degenerate, pathologically different, criminal type. In nineteenth-century Italy, Cesare Lombroso drew from the emerging ‘racial sciences’ that were flourishing across Northern Europe (Kohn 1995) as justifications for the brutalities of various colonial projects, to present his masterwork—L’huomo Criminale/Criminal Man (1876). The concomitant development of ‘race-thinking’, ‘crime-thinking’ and imperialism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is not a simple accident of history. Their common intellectual heritage demand continual critical evaluation. The proto-criminologists, such as Cesare Beccaria of the immediate post-Enlightenment period, who became known as the Classical School (Rock 1994), consolidated notions of law, sovereignty and contract that assumed the exclusion and subordination of black people. Their ideas of universal and inalienable rights applying to all humanity, were more specifically those of a narrow section of humanity; white men of property. The social contract was both a racial contract (Mills 1997) and a sexual contract (Pateman 1988; Plumwood 1995). Even as the slaves of the French colony in Haiti rose up in 1791 to claim their place in the revolutionary universalism declared by the events

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in France and America, they were denied, excluded and violently suppressed (James 2001; Buck-Morss 2009). When the French attempt to suppress the slave revolt failed and Toussaint L’Ouverture’s claim for the inclusion of liberated slaves into French citizenship, and thus full membership of humanity, was denied, the message was loud and clear. Black lives don’t matter to the French. When Jamaica’s Governor Edward John Eyre ordered the massacre of the town’s people in Morant Bay on 11 October 1865, this military act of savagery told the same story (Hall 1996). Black lives don’t matter to the British. A 100 years later, when Martin Luther King referred to the US Constitutions ‘promissory note’ of universal emancipation in his ‘I have a dream’ speech, he reminded his audience it had been returned ‘marked insufficient funds’. The message was clear: black lives count less than white’s. Gilroy (1993) is adamant: this profoundly consequential history of critical events around race in the emergence of modernity is all too often taken to be marginal and epiphenomenal, unfortunate rather than formative. That criminology’s intellectual roots were so well nourished in this period of colonial aggression and violent racism should alert us to its continuing capacity to reproduce and foster narrow and oppressive conceptual frameworks. Cesare Lombroso, the father of criminology, is the much-lampooned figurehead of the positivist tradition in criminology that adopted the methods of natural science to generate typologies within a human hierarchy, at the top of which stood the urbane, white man of letters. Surprisingly, it turns out that the inspiring wellsprings of enlightenment knowledge had all the depth of a mirror. Lombroso’s alignment with the emergence of racial science sealed a relationship between biology, race and crime that has yet to be fully undone. As Gabbidon (2007: 18) points out, the relationship has had profoundly differential consequences and “resulted in misery for countless people of colour”. Valier (2002) notes that Lombroso’s identification of unruly primitivism among the natives of Southern Italy was not simply a form of naïve maverick scientism, but was shaped by contemporary struggles for the unification of Italy. Lombroso’s proposition that homicide rates in the south of Italy were higher than in the north because the southern peasant population was derived from inferior racial stock, that included more African and Oriental elements (Gabbidon 2007), was well

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received in the north of Italy, where political impetus for unification was centred. The dark-skinned peasants of the southern agrarian economies were resisting unification with the cosmopolitan, industrialising northern states. Lombroso’s typology, that cast them low on the scale of civilisation, neighbouring on the African by dint of geography and skin colour, provided convenient justification for military pacification. Garibaldi’s conquering army marched on a full stomach provided by the eponymous biscuit, and was driven forward by a head full of ideas provided by Lombroso and the Scuolo Positiva.

Nasty, Brutish and Criminal: The Enemy Within As European nations began to extend their interests across the planet and compete for control of its riches, they were confronted with incontrovertible evidence of its diverse cultures and histories. Establishing the supremacy of their own national culture became something of a fixation for European nations in the nineteenth century, and involved elaborate reflections on the nature and extent of their essential qualities. Robert Musil’s novel, ‘The Man Without Qualities’, is a mordant examination of these cultural obsessions. It charts the declining fortunes and failing ambitions of the Austro–Hungarian Empire and the novel provides the Italian criminologists, Pascale Pasquino (1991), with a literary account of criminology’s role in the struggles for a European order, then and now. For Pasquino (ibid, 245) Musil’s novel provides critical insights into criminology’s ‘general regime of knowledge’, its ‘special savoir’, at a particular historical and cultural conjuncture. It is a novel with profound resonance for criminologists, as Pasquino demonstrates, but also for anyone concerned about contemporary conditions in a country coming to terms with the collapse of its imperial ambitions and the myopia of its political class (Gilroy 2004). ‘Moosbrugger’ is the recurring brutish, character in Musil’s novel, a hapless ‘criminal’ who simultaneously represents the collectively seething masses and the individuated ‘devious other’ that Pasquino recognises as the ‘homo criminalis’ of the Italian Scuola Positiva. Moosbrugger fascinates and repels the novel’s central

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character, Ulrich, the eponymous ‘man without qualities’, as he narrates the transitions of European modernity with eloquent distraction. No other work of fiction quite so acutely fixes and dramatises the ironies and paradoxes of criminology that Young (2011) insists are the source of its best and most radical energies. Nairn (1988, 2001), for example draws extensively on Musil’s (1979) novel to illuminate his analysis of the post-imperial tensions that gather, increasingly urgently, around the cultural, constitutional and political configuration of the United Kingdom. Brexit, as the result of the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union came to be known, dragged issues of whiteness, belonging and national sovereignty into popular political discourse, where they belong. But not on terms that have been easy to engage with constructively.

Recalling Race: Theoretical Regression It is important to think about what the analysis of race actually achieves and why there is so much wariness about its presence, or otherwise, in criminological scholarship (Parmar 2017). Criminological scholarship provides compelling evidence of the scale and consequence of racialising dynamics, in prisons most glaringly of all, and yet relatively little attention is paid to how those dynamics insinuate themselves into daily life, reproducing the way race is paradoxically both persistent and changing, elusive yet pervasive, something and nothing (Phillips 2012; Smith 2016; Essed 2002). The neglect of the way race produces tangible results from intangible sources restricts the development of ways of resisting and challenging its toxic social presence. Criminological scholarship could do with better tools to bridge the gap between the ontological subjectivity of race and its epistemological objectivity; tools that can account for the way it appears as a solid ‘social fact’ but then disappears as a ‘social fiction’. The consensus that race is a social construct rather than a biological reality has generated significant perverse and unintended consequences. Among these is a growing silence and reluctance to engage with its still existing realities. According to the prevailing logic, the world has become post-racial, or is well on the way to that place simply because

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race has been exposed as a bogus, pseudoscientific concept that can only belong to the past, along with the other discredited notions, such as a flat earth and alchemy. What this perspective neglects is the way race was a concept that dealt with the mechanics of human emancipation and the ‘necessity’ of limiting its application to certain white people— those with property and a penis. Those mechanics of how humanity recognises itself, and the difficulty of finding a language and universal practice for doing so, remain all too solid in the present era (Gilroy 2014a, b). As is often the case, Stuart Hall put his finger on it when he reflected on how Marxism morphed into cultural studies in the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies in the 1980s: We had to develop a methodology that taught us to attend, not only to what people said about race but… to what people could not say about race, it was the silences that told us something; it was what wasn’t there, it was what was invisible, what couldn’t be put into the frame, what was apparently unsayable that we needed to attend to. (cited in Rodman 2006, in Smith 2014)

The result was ‘new ethnicities’ (Hall 1992) which offered a way of conceptualising human difference, not as a hierarchy of worth but a diversity of cultures. The problem lies with the way this novel, critical approach got taken up as a simple substitute discourse, ‘race’ cleansed of distasteful connotations of genetic purity, holocausts and history. Culture and ethnicity have always been part of the racialising baggage, but the abandonment of race in favour of ethnicity allowed for the separation of these elements from the problematic history of race, and its explicit roots in colonialism, hierarchy, exploitation and oppression. Race, as Theo Goldberg (2009) quips, has become raceless. Some of the most virulent right-wing bigots will politely declare themselves to be ‘non-racist’ and refer instead to cultural incompatibilities that are simply ‘unfortunate’, ‘unavoidable’ or ‘inevitable’. The ‘Other’ is never biological now, because that would be racist, and thus intellectually unsustainable, but they can be ‘Other’ in other ways that will not be accommodated, and ethnicity or culture quickly

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provided the new alibis for this (Lentin and Titley 2010). Cultural differences have become dislodged from the dynamism of history and social power struggles, to be turned into reified categories of belonging, fixed and essential—just like race! ‘Difference’, silently coded as race, is understood as a perennial feature of all human societies—synonymous with a universal difficulty of accommodating strangers, rather than a historically conditioned and specific social formation. In the neo-liberal post-racial world, bias may be conceded as structural, but it is intrinsic to all societies and builds in increments from the individual to the social, rather than any other way round. The post-racial world is a colour-blind one that twists the sociological wisdom that ‘if men believe some thing is real, it is real in its effects’ (Thomas and Thomas 1928) to one of ‘if something is not real, it cannot have any effects’. If there is no such thing as race, how can there be racism? Feminists in the 1980s used to joke that 20 years of feminism had not resulted in men doing more housework but it had succeeded in making them think they did a lot more housework. The success of multiculturalism as a series of policy formulations is not that it has succeeded in eliminating racism but that it has persuaded white people that it is not really their problem. Almost nobody believes in ‘race’, or at least explicitly states that they do, but middle-class white people are more likely to think of ‘race’ in abstract terms as a kind of intellectual unicorn that has now wandered off-stage into some kind of harmless never-land. In this post-racial schema ‘race’ does not exist, so neither does its history or any material effects. Unfortunately, as Appiah (2014: 113) remarks, “the concept of race might be a unicorn, but its horn could draw blood”. The disavowal of the existence of race is a recurring and defining feature of contemporary white identities (Garner 2007). Frankenberg (1993) analyses the way white people adopt a kind of wilful ‘colour-blindness’ by asserting themselves to be oblivious of ‘race’. As Frankenberg (1993: 145) points out for a white person ‘to be caught in the act of seeing race [is] to be caught being prejudiced’. White disavowal is frequently accompanied by a strategy of deflection that situates any residual symptoms in the ‘passions of the popular classes’ (Ranciere cited in Budgen 2010). Where racism does manifest, according to this perspective, is

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among the fragmented white underclass, ‘the chavs’ of Starkey’s diatribe, ‘white-trash’ and ‘rednecks’ in the USA, ‘petits blancs’ in France. Among these sections of society, adrift from the relentless march of progress and ill-equipped to adopt the omnivorous, cosmopolitan appetites of the middle class, racism is conceded to be a problem: an irrational reaction based on the atavistic fantasies of the unsophisticated masses. Within this perspective, the role of the state, the most powerful structuring force in society, and the elite’s powerful collectivities, are erased from the picture. The value of insisting on race is that it connects the subject matter to history and ideology, to theorising and to struggles for human emancipation and egalitarianism. Retrieving race from the hostile post-racial miasma swirling around Muslims, refugees and black or brown migrant populations can help to situate people in particular contexts that foster more active resistance and greater resilience. It can reanimate anti-racism.

Anti-racism in Criminology The profile of anti-racism within criminology is not particularly high. It probably peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Paul Gilroy’s (1987; Gilroy and Sim 1985) contributions around the Left Realism initiative promoted by Jock Young, John Lea and Roger Matthews (Lea and Young 1984; Young and Mathews 1992, 1993; Cook and Hudson 1993). The decline of anti-racism is not confined to criminology or other academic disciplines. Despite some historically high-profile success such as the anti-colonial struggles of the 50s and 60s in Africa, the Civil Rights Movement in the USA during the 60s and 70s and the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, more recently anti-racism has receded as an active or militant presence in social movements, political policy and national agendas. And academic disciplines. Yet racism is resurgent in the USA, in Australia, in the UK and many other parts of Europe. Race has never been a fixed, singular or simple entity. Thinking of it as having only been established and then rejected by science is as

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erroneous as it is disabling. Challenging racism involves more than simply repeating the scientific revelation of its non-existence. Reciting this truth as the central mission of anti-racism misidentifies racism’s appeal, which is not to logic or intellectual integrity, but to sentiment, aspiration and affect. Racist ‘sympathisers’ have shifted their alignment with the changing forms that racism has taken much more smoothly than anti-racists, particularly academic anti-racists. The lecturers have lived up to their name, criticising racists for their errors of logic, picking out the holes in their argument and issuing corrections as if the racist’s greatest failing was their intellectual and interpretive limitations. Racists simply dismiss them as out of touch, experts in everything but life itself. Racism’s appeal lies in its performance and promises as well as its dividends, as Du Bois (1903) was quick to point out. However contrived and illusory these may be, they achieve a common touch. If anti-racism does not contest the performance and simply relies on ‘the facts’ and ‘correcting false logic’ it will fail, not least because modern, recent racism is also in the business of disavowing race, contesting its presence and camouflaging its effects with reference to culture, differences and the human need for belonging, distance and separation. The triumph of presenting race as a construction perversely aids and abets the reactionary notion of race as an irrelevance, anti-racism becomes nothing more than a recited truth; an obsessive fixation only for out-of-touch liberals (Lentin and Titley). This is because in the white, neo-liberal imagination, anti-racism has been reduced to a kind of pantomime villain, a theatrical caricature, liable to expose individuals as ‘racists’ in a shrill register of accusation and moral failure. The racism that is popularly understood to be the target of conventional anti-racism is the racism of personal agency, the racism of violent disruption and exceptional incidents. This is the anti-racism of a policing, authoritarian, correctional culture, rather than the anti-racism of emancipation, egalitarianism and planetary humanism (Gilroy 2014a, b). By appearing as accusatory, instrumental and calculating this anti-racism tends to miss its target (racism) and fuel the fires it seeks to quench with further resentment. The favourite term of dismissal for the anti- anti-racist is ‘political correctness’, conflating the politics with the gesture so that it becomes the politics of the gesture. It targets an anti-racism seemingly

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ill-equipped to challenge those banal aspects of racism that structure everyday life, direct routine activities, affect relationships, mould feelings, shape embodiment and conditions the way we inhabit various spaces. This anti-racism suffers from appearing to rely on the power of the state against people, while the broader mechanics of statecraft continue to foster racist divisions with relative impunity. This anti-racism ‘from above’ tends to focus on the easy targets, the already precarious and stigmatised sections of the population, rather than the established and secure beneficiaries of racism. This form of anti-racism has been easy to caricature and has declined in vigour because it has neglected the basic ‘grammar’ of race (Bonilla-Silva 2012; Cohen 2002), its substructure in favour of some of its symptoms.

Prison, Everyday Life and Racism Working with Coretta Phillips on a recent ethnographic study of ethnicity, race and social relations among men in two English prisons (Phillips 2012), I encountered some of the more familiar contours of race and the new landscapes of multicultural conviviality described by Gilroy (2004). The experience of working and writing with a colleague who is black, mixed race, Jewish and working class illuminated the myriad, filigree formations of race I would have missed as a white, middle class academic, the kind of academic prisons and prisoners have become quite accustomed to. I would not have seen, for example the look on the face of a white administrative assistant in HMP Maidstone as her gaze settled over my shoulder on Coretta in a glaze of sustained incomprehension. I am sure she had seen a black woman before, but perhaps not in her office. Her eyes were asking ‘what is that woman doing in here?’, a space otherwise occupied exclusively by white people with a clear role—me, the academic addressing her colleague with a question and then this woman she seemingly could not place. On one of our first days visiting the prison wings to explain to the men that we wanted to spend several months in the prison finding out about how life is lived when men from different ethnic backgrounds are thrown together by a prison sentence, I got another glimpse. On

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the wing, as cell doors were unlocked and men begin to drift into their social routines, I found myself alone and feeling isolated, awkward in approaching the men with our leaflet about the project. A few men stopped and chatted, mildly curious but mostly indifferent. They commented on the general absence of racism, how low key the issue was, for the most part. Further down the wing I could see Coretta, almost hidden behind a gathering crowd of mostly black men, keen to talk to her, surprised to see her, animated by her presence. Comparing notes afterwards, we had different stories to tell. Hers were of numerous and relatively consistent accounts of the racism the men both find, sense and suspect among the almost exclusively white prison officers (see Phillips 2012; Phillips and Earle 2010). As the field work and analysis unfolded, both our experiences held true—race and ethnicity permeate prison life in low key, convivial ways, and in many other registers, including varieties of violence, conflict and tension. “Have you noticed”, Coretta asked one day, “how all the officers speak to you, look at you first when we meet them?”. Although I am slightly older than Coretta, she is the more senior and experienced academic, the lead investigator who established contact with the prison governor and introduced her research proposal to the staff team at a well-attended meeting of prison officers. Needless to say I hadn’t, but having been prompted to observe, to tune in, I found she was almost invariably right. Perhaps an understandable mistake—I am older; I fit the profile of white expectations, if anyone was doing any profiling. I am white and male with a middle class, southern accent. So what is happening? Habits of comportment, social exchange, comfort, deference and exclusion. It is a white and gendered habitus—the social structures of race, class and gender laced through personal experience and every social interaction, largely invisible to me; obvious, repetitive and banal to Coretta. These collateral effects of race, class and gender make their presence felt at various stages of the research, and the writing, but I am still shocked by the extent to which they are to me revelations and to Coretta simply mundane if irritating features of her working life; not unusual. Sometime later in the research project, we both attend a conference in Oxford to present some emerging findings. After the first day,

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over breakfast, Coretta tells me what just happened to her as she left her hotel room a few minutes earlier. Shutting the door behind her, she hears a woman’s voice behind her asking her politely if she would like her to leave the door to the room open. The woman has mistaken Coretta for a cleaning maid. Because she is white and Coretta is not. They go their separate ways only to encounter each other in the queue for the buffet where the woman realises her error and begs to be forgiven—mortified at what she has done, knowing as any decent sociologist would, that the violence of race has just been actualised, found her as its conductor and struck another human body. Telling me this, Coretta muses wryly that it isn’t the first time such a thing has happened. At a journal editorial board meeting, she has been passed a pile of papers by a fellow board member who murmurs gently if she “wouldn’t mind getting her a few copies”. She has mistaken Coretta for an administrative assistant. Because she is white and Coretta is not.1 These are exactly the kinds of experience recounted by Du Bois at the end of the nineteenth century and bel hooks at the end of the twentieth, both black academics recounting how racism insidiously denies the integrity of their being (hooks 1990), places them always outside the domain of the everyday and the ordinary, always liable to ‘the terrifying attribution of difference’ (Fanon 1967; Smith 2016: 56). Elijah Anderson (2011) refers to such episodes as ‘The Nigger Moment’, and recalls his own. As Phillips points out (Phillips and Webster 2014: 178) it is where Anderson and any “African American, regardless of their class position and status, are painfully reminded that they are always vulnerable to being degraded, humiliated, demoralised by their treatment at the hands of the white majority”. This experience, from which “there is no protection, no sanctuary, no escaping” (Anderson 2011: 253) is an imposed and unwelcome form of self-knowledge that you will always be seen as a problem waiting to happen. It includes the permanent threat of racism’s ‘mark of the plural’, also revealed by Du Bois (Smith 2016), which refers to the dehumanisation of racial categorisation and aggregation on which racism depends and in which it trades, not unlike some branches of criminology. The style of writing Du Bois crafted in The Souls of Black Folk, with its song lyrics and stories, was a deliberate rejoinder to impersonal social science, reminding

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the reader ‘not to forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul’ reaching for ‘the horizon of its life’ (Du Bois 1903: 169). Claudia Rankine (2014), the award-winning US poet, continues this writing tradition by “forging a new mode of nonfiction that transcends the divide between the personal and the intellectual and renders pressing issues of our time into portraits of day-to-day lived experience” (Flood 2016). Her McArthur ‘genius grant’ award-winning book, Citizen—An American Lyric, is a catalogue of everyday racism. It travels from the white grandstanding and horror of Katrina’s aftermath in New Orleans, to the casual humiliation of Serena Williams by a white tennis umpire, via incidental exchanges with her neighbour. Their resemblance to Coretta’s accounts is unnerving. Checking into the Hilton Hotel, New Orleans to present papers at the American Society of Criminology, Coretta and I approach the desk together. Coretta asks the young white woman if we can leave our bags somewhere until check-in time. The woman says she thinks she can find a room for each of us even though we are early. Pulling up my details she says “Thank you Dr Earle, you’ll be in room 4116, fourth floor”. Then she enters Coretta’s details and presents her with her room card: “Here you are Ms Phillips, room 3200”. As we leave the desk to make our way to the rooms, we joke about me getting addressed as Dr Earle while Coretta, the senior academic does not. Perhaps it was the preregistration details that were entered into the hotel system simply being read out by the desk woman. My room turns out to be lovely, with a window facing across the Mississippi river. I discover later that Coretta’s is not. It is inward facing, has no views, with poor aspects facing an interior concrete courtyard. Something or nothing? A less good room. Did the woman give it to Coretta deliberately? Was it about ‘race’? How can you know? How can you not? It is about these kinds of dread-filled ambiguities, ‘the questions that get stuck in your dreams’, that Claudia Rankine writes about so powerfully. Why did the man at the cash register want to know if she thinks her card will work? Why didn’t he ask her white friend about hers? Why didn’t she say something? Everyday racism. Atrocities haunting the living, the ghosts of the past living in the present.

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Questions for an Anti-racist Criminology Pitts (1993: 103) analysis of anti-racist struggles around crime, criminal justice and criminology in the 1980s concludes on its apparently dismal outcomes in the UK: “By the late 1980s every agency and institution within what had been the welfare state and the criminal justice system had, or was in the process of developing, anti-racist statements, anti-racist policies, antiracist strategies, anti-racist codes of practice and sanctions for breaches of same”. Anti-racism, argues Pitts, had been reduced and co-opted by the new managerialism of the emerging neo-liberal order to produce the cosmetic tyrannies of ‘political correctness’. In the contemporary critical vernacular, class politics had been superseded by identity politics. Revisiting Pitt’s account, the arguments are painfully familiar but the balance of power has shifted radically. According to Pitts (1993: 106), antiracist currents in criminology in the 1980s suffered from “an idiosyncratic epistemology, an over-reliance on American data, a simplistic perception of ‘blacks’, a neglect of the ‘whites’ who appear to share a similar predicament, [and] a muddled view of culture”. These flaws are linked to a more general abandonment of “the concept of social structure” influenced by the growth of administrative criminology and its supine obedience to the newly dominant managerial order. As Fukuyama (1993: 17) had done before him, Pitts appears to lament the passing of “the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” because it appeared to have been “replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands”. These mournful prescriptions of ‘the end of history’, the TINA doctrine (There Is No Alternative), now seem a little optimistic. The popular alternatives that have gathered in the margins are of the Right, not the Left. Phillips and Webster (2014) open their collection, New Directions in Race, Ethnicity and Crime, optimistically but with the salutary observation “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”: the more things change, the more they remain the same. Comparing their collection with Cook and Hudson’s (1993) bears out their assessment. Phillips and Webster’s brave attempt to ‘bend the paradigm’ within which race, crime and criminology

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circulate cries out for more attention. Without more collective criminological effort and wider participation there will be no way of explaining the paradox of the new racisms their collection examines: “racist and discriminatory attitudes and behaviours appear to have declined while their effects of racially and ethnically-based outcomes of disparity, disproportion and inequality have not” (Phillips and Webster 2014: 9). In October 2016, the Youth Justice Board (YJB 2016) announced that 47% of the custodial population of young men in England and Wales was composed of men from black and minority ethnic groups. The astonishing reductions in the level of incarceration from over 3000 in 2006 to less than 900 in 2016 had been very unevenly distributed, leaving a custodial population almost half of which was non-white. Also in 2016, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched an appeal for a comprehensive new race strategy to challenge and reduce racial inequalities in the UK. Among many findings of persistent inequality, it reports that: • Black people are much more likely to be victims of crime and be treated more harshly in the criminal justice system. You are more than twice as likely to be murdered if you are black in England and Wales and three times more likely to be prosecuted and sentenced than if you are white. In addition to this, race remains the most commonly recorded motivation of hate crime in England and Wales at 82%. • Despite improving educational attainment, ethnic minority people are still being held back in the job market. Black, Asian and ethnic minority workers with degrees are two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than white workers with degrees. Black workers with degrees are paid 23.1% less on average than white workers with degrees. • If you are young and from an ethnic minority, your life chances have got much worse over the past 5 years and are at the most challenging for generations. Since 2010, there has been a 49% increase in the number of 16–24-year-olds across the UK from ethnic minority communities who are long-term unemployed, compared with a fall of 2% if you are white. Black workers are also more than twice as likely to be in insecure forms of employment such as temporary contracts

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or working for an agency—which increased by nearly 40% for black and Asian workers, compared with a 16% rise for white workers. The ethnographic work on race makes abundantly clear that it is a complex phenomenon. Constantly shifting in emphasis, race fulfils an ideological function created by the globalising neo-liberal economy. As national boundaries, nation states and senses of belonging to discrete national entities, have been eroded, racism has taken on new ethnoreligious and nationalistic characteristics. Against the ambivalence, uncertainty and ambiguity generated by a globalised economy, racism offers certainties and clarity but delivers fear and loathing. Its ideological function is to transform the violence of subdividing humanity from the properly human to the racialised infrahuman (Gilroy 2014a, b) into a kind of social authority, a legitimate political narrative. Recalling anti-racism is an urgent critical task because the neoliberal reconfigurations of racism have become exceptionally vigorous. Post-racial delusions, white privilege, indifference and impunity conspire against an effective anti-racism. There is a lot of work being accomplished that has pushed anti-racism to the margins and reduced race to an individual moral failure or a fantasy from bogie wonderland. Questions about race need to be asked. Addressing the American Society of Criminology annual conference in New Orleans, its first black President, Ruth D Peterson, asked some: “What is the role of conscious racial animus? What is its relationship to implicit bias? What implicit assumptions are there within the concept? Why does research by scholars of colour remain outside the mainstream of the discipline? What are the consequences of the under-representation of scholars of colour in criminology? What questions, what research programmes are missing because they are missing?”2 Peterson ventures some answers of her own, but criminology needs more. It cannot turn away from race, particularly while there is so much mounting evidence of its corrosive presence in criminal justice, and so little understanding of how racisms produce race. The sporadic or ambivalent attention to race within criminology relegates the issue to the supplemental sidelines when it needs to be recognised as central and constitutive (Parmar 2017). Anti-racism in criminology can produce the wished-for non-racism, but non-racism

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cannot produce anti-racism. For criminologists recalling anti-racism, going back to the drawing board, can involve creating new and public spaces for questioning the relationship between race, prison and punishment. Generating new ideas about this relationship and insisting on its urgency can ‘bend the paradigm’ as Phillips and Webster have proposed, and help criminology fulfil the promise they identify.

Notes 1. Both these incidents are discussed in Phillips and Webster (2014, p 179). 2. From personal conference notes, ASC, New Orleans 2016.

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Author Biography Rod Earle  is a senior Lecturer in Youth Justice at the Open University. Before joining the Faculty of Health and Social Care at the Open University in 2008, Rod spent 2 years working with Dr Coretta Phillips (LSE) on an ethnographic research project examining men’s ethnic and social identities in prison. He has published widely from this research and in 2014 completed his Ph.D. by Publication in the Department of Social Policy and Criminology at The Open University. He would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Dr Coretta Phillips and Dr Alpa Parmar on a draft of this paper.

The Social Censure of Hidden Youth in Hong Kong Gloria Hongyee Chan and T. Wing Lo

Social Censure Perspective Social censure is to “blame, criticize, express disapproval, or condemn”, “a category expressing cultural disapproval” (McLaughlin and Muncie 2006: 388). For Sumner (1990a), censure is more than labelling, as the original labelling theory fails to address and account for the processes constituting the ideological formations, domination and social regulations that result in labels. In the social censure perspective (Sumner 1990a), deviance does not mean that the behaviour is deviant by nature, but rather that it reflects the “emotions, ideologies, and values G.H. Chan (*)  School of Social Sciences, Caritas Institute of Higher Education, Hong Kong, China e-mail: [email protected] T. Wing Lo  Department of Applied Social Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_6

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of powerful social groups” (Sumner 2004: 9), reflecting “feelings of disapproval” by the dominant (McLaughlin and Muncie 2006: 388). A group of individuals is considered deviant when it is viewed by the dominant class to threaten its hegemonic state. Hence, in order to safeguard its hegemony and protect its vested interests, the dominant class “sets apart” (Szasz 1973: xxv–xxvi) those who are viewed as “bad” and “outlawed” from the “good”, “clean” and “legal”, so as to facilitate its policing and social control (Roberts 1993: 171). In order to fully explain the nature and operation of social censure, the illustrations that follow are classified into creation, application and consequence, showing how social censure is applied to the targets of censure through the creation of labels and discourses, as well as the results that social censure brings about.

Creation of Social Censure Social censure involves “…complex, composite cultural forms, containing the ideology of the dominant classes” (Sumner 1981: 279); it is not merely a label but represents “categories of denunciation or abuse lodged within very complex, historically loaded practical conflicts and moral debates” (Sumner 1990a: 26). Simply put, from the social censure perspective, deviance is a moral–political construct, reflecting its violation of the norms and standards of the dominant class (Sumner 1990b, 2004). This definition of deviance aims to oppress all those in conflict with the dominant class (Sumner 1979, 1990b). Since social censures are “highly acculturated forms of moral and political judgments”, the meaning of deviance is flexible and is culturally and historically specific, rather than “unambiguous, consistent, and settled” (Sumner 1990a: 27). In society, the dominant class, which “dominates the economy, owns the means of mass communication and controls the reins of political power”, has “the greatest capacity to assert its censures in the legal and moral discourses” (Sumner 1990a: 28). To make the social censure more justifiable, social censures “often settle into ‘custom’, ‘law’, or ‘science’”, and are even transformed into “scientific categories commanding

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their content to be the province of the expert” (i.e. doctors, lawyers and helping professionals) (Sumner 1990a: 298). If we consider social censure as having “a more generalized character” (Sumner 1990a: 27), it “attempts to unify and publicize the hegemonic bloc’s vision of its nation and morality” (Sumner 1990b: 47–49), prior to the recovery of any scientific evidence for its socially constructed discourses.

Application of Social Censure Social censure is a two-sided moral-political activity enacted by the powerful dominant class on the powerless subordinate targets of censure (Sumner 1990a). The application of social censure “excludes what should be included, includes what should be excluded” (Sumner 1990a: 26), which means that the dominant class includes various forces, such as law, policies and institutions, to exclude those it views as “deviant”, “pathologic” and “delinquent” (Roberts 1993: 171). Social censure is tied to a will to enforce social control (McLaughlin and Muncie 2006). In order to achieve this aim, social censure not only involves the creation of discourses but also deploys various tactics and strategies—the “penal apparatus”—which allow the “policing” and “perpetual surveillance of the population” (Foucault 1977a: 281, 285), so as to “signify, denounce, and regulate” (Sumner 1990a: 27) the targets of social censure. It differentiates the “deviant”, “pathological”, and “criminal” from the “normal” and the “good”, and “controls, prevents, and punishes” the former (Sumner 1990a: 28).

Consequence of Social Censure As social censure is employed to “signify, denounce, and regulate, not to explain”, the reality is masked by the socially constructed discourses of the dominant class (Sumner 1981). The effort made by the dominant class to introduce and perpetuate its discourses for the purpose of achieving public support, and the subsequent widespread internalisation of these discourses, helps in the reproduction of the hegemonic bloc

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(Sumner 1990a) and in the blocking of the “clear-headed enquiry” of the public in its effort to seek the true nature of the reality (Sumner 1981: 279). Also, a differentiation between the good and the normal, and the bad offenders, inevitably results (Sumner 1990a: 27). Despite the attempts of the dominant class to win the support of the subordinates (Sumner 1990a), as noted by Roberts (1993: 180), “social censures are not written on tablets of stone, prescribed for all times” because the enactment of social censure on the opposing subordinates triggers their resistance. Hence, social censure is always subject to an endless struggle for hegemony (Roberts 1993). To maintain the hegemonic bloc, the dominant class must undergo continuous attempts at redefinition and negotiation in an effort to oppress the subordinates and eliminate their resistant power (Sumner 1990a). The reluctance of the subordinates to learn and accept the censures, in turn, cause the “dominant regulatory agencies to try to destroy, colonize or police their cultures, until the censure is overthrown or falls into disuse” (Sumner 1990a: 28). The above literature illustrates the operating process of social censure, describing how ideologies and discourses are created to justify the legitimacy of censuring, and how censuring is asserted in an effort to eliminate potentially dangerous targets, safeguard political interests and ensure the attainment of hegemony. By uncovering how “deviance” is defined, and investigating the cultural and historical meanings underlying the phenomenon (Sumner 1981), the social censure perspective is surely significant in providing new insights into how certain phenomena can be looked into, in terms of how social relations and mechanisms of power play a part (Roberts 1993). In Hong Kong and Japan, hidden youth is portrayed with a negative image and these youths are considered deviant (Chan and Lo 2010; Saito 1998). However, in ancient China, hermits (individuals who retreated from social participations to the home) were seen as having good moral character, and as being aloof from politics and material pursuit (Jiang 2009). Hence, it can be seen that the meaning of “being hidden” is flexible, and can vary between different historical junctures and social contexts; the “deviance” attached to “being hidden” in contemporary society reflects the existence of social censure in the construction

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of the hidden youth phenomenon in Hong Kong. Moreover, although Secher (2002) stated that the mismatch between youth’s viewpoint and the societal viewpoint constituted youth’s hidden behaviour, this perspective has been under-investigated in the studies of hidden youth. Hence, the social censure perspective, which considers the dynamic interactions that exist between the powerful dominant class and the opposing subordinates who resist the censuring, is able to uncover the perspective of youths of their hidden behaviour and help restore the “reality” of the phenomenon of hidden youth. Studies on social censure in Chinese communities are extremely limited (Jiang et al. 2013; Lo 1993a, b; Lo and Ngan 2009). This chapter aims to report a study of hidden youth in Hong Kong from the perspective of social censure. It aims to bring about a theoretical contribution to the study of social censure by extending the scope of the study to the context of young people, in which they suffer severe negative labelling and are deprived of any opportunity to voice their thoughts and opinions.

Theoretical Framework Social censure is the theoretical framework employed herein through which to analyse the differences in perception between the youth and adults of the hidden youth phenomenon. It will be illustrated in three separate parts: creation, application and consequence. Nine theoretical concepts—namely, Ideology/Hegemony, the Label of deviance, Power/ Knowledge, Bio-power→Docile body, the Overseeing gaze, the Deployment of discipline, Resistance, Sense of self/Identity and Subculture—are incorporated into the theoretical framework. Ideology/Hegemony describes how the dominant parties construct and disseminate the constructed discourses in their effort to control the resistant parties and maintain the status quo (Geertz 1973; Gramsci 1971), while the Label of deviance concerns how an individual is viewed as deviant under “the application by others of rules” (Becker 1963: 9). Since the creation of social censure relates to how deviance is defined by the dominant class in its effort to enforce social control and signify

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bad individuals who threaten the social order of society, using the concepts of Ideology/Hegemony and the Label of deviance enables us to more closely measure how hidden youths are labelled, signified as deviant and censured due to their violations against the dominant ideology constructed by the dominant elites. As social censure concerns how censure is enforced and enacted to achieve the social control and hegemony of the dominant parties, the incorporation of the concepts of Power/Knowledge (Foucault 1980b), Bio-power→Docile body (Foucault 1975), the Overseeing gaze (Foucault 1975) and the Deployment of discipline (Foucault 1975) enables the examination of how hidden youth is subject to the surveillance, indoctrination and discipline of the surveillants within the unequal power relations that exist between hidden youths and the surveillants. So far as the consequence of social censure is concerned, using the concepts of Resistance (Foucault 1980b), Sense of self/Identity (e.g. Bala 1998; Tsai 1997) and Subculture (e.g. Cohen 1955; Hebdige 1979), we can examine how youths respond to the social censure, as well as, how they develop coping strategies in the face of the censuring acts respectively. Resistance, as stated by Foucault (1980b), is a definite result of power. Hence, using this concept to examine the consequence of social censure, in turn, aids any investigation into how hidden youths resist social censure. Sense of self/Identity refers to the self-concept of youths, built upon their experience in interacting with the environment (Bala 1998) as well as their concept of their own status in society (Goffman 1963). The application of this concept allows an investigation into how hidden youths’ sense of self changes under the enactment of social censure by various surveillants. Meanwhile, Subculture is a culture or system developed by the people sharing similar backgrounds or situations in an effort to solve the problem of status frustration (Cohen 1955) and even to challenge the hegemonic order (Hebdige 1979). Employing this concept to an examination of the consequence of the social censure experienced by the hidden youth aids our understanding of how youths choose the hidden situation as an ultimate strategy by which to cope with the problem of being censured by the surveillants (see Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1  Theoretical framework

Results The participants in this study included both hidden youths and the surveillants of various systems (i.e. parents, teachers, social workers and police officers, who interact with the youth in daily circumstances). Qualitative analysis was the research method employed to determine how social censure is operated in the context of hidden youth in Hong Kong, and how youths become hidden youths from the perspective of social censure. In order to collect the required qualitative data, semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted with 42 hidden youths and 51 surveillants from across the different systems, including 21 parents, 11 teachers, 16 social workers/counsellors and three police officers. Hidden youth participants were required to fulfil the following criteria: (1) Hong Kong residents; (2) aged between 12 and 30; (3) hidden for at least 6 months; and (4) no previous psychiatric history. In the following, the results of the data analysis herein undertaken will be organised into the creation, application and consequence of social censure, so as to illustrate how social censure is enacted on youths, causing

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them to progress to the hidden situation as an ultimate coping response. So far as the results on the application of social censure are concerned, verbatim accounts of both surveillants and hidden youths will be presented and illustrated in terms of three different stages (Deviant youth, Youth in seclusion and Hidden youth), so as to show that youth becoming hidden youth is a developmental process, during which repeated cycles of social censure are experienced. The numbers of hidden youths at each stage of the developmental process were 13 (Deviant youth, Stage (1), 11 (Youth in seclusion, Stage (2) and 18 (Hidden youth, Stage (3), respectively. However, as youths in the later stages of being hidden had already experienced the earlier stages of being hidden, an analysis of the verbatim accounts of the experiences of hidden youths at earlier stages of being hidden have been incorporated within the accounts of those in the later stages of being hidden. Simply put, the analysis of hidden youth in the Deviant youth stage (Stage 1) includes accounts of those currently in the Seclusion stage (Stage 2) as well as in the Hidden youth stage (Stage 3) (i.e. N = 42), whereas the analysis of hidden youth in the Seclusion stage (Stage 2) involves not only those currently in seclusion but also those in the Hidden youth stage (i.e. Stage 3) (i.e. N = 24).

Creation of Social Censure The creation of social censure concerns the ideologies, discourses and labels that serve as tools by which to signify, denounce and regulate deviant actors (Sumner 1990a). In the context of hidden youth in Hong Kong, the ideology that guides the censuring of youth is promising youth. This social construction has become a universal descriptive language internalised by the public (Sumner 1990a); it motivates people to act according to certain societal expectations and deprives the youth by other potential pathways for development. In order to prevent individuals from considering not following this path, deviance (including hidden youth) is defined in such a way as to be heavily denounced, in order to generate a moral panic and general disgust towards all kinds of deviant youth. As the social censure perspective (Sumner 1990a) posits, the media is one of the forces that has mobilised to enact social censure. In the

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context of hidden youth in Hong Kong, it serves as a force by which to enlarge the censuring effect by duplicating and amplifying the dominant discourses. In the following, the dominant ideologies of promising youth, deviant youth and hidden youth are illustrated, so as to show how these discourses are constructed by the dominant class and enlarged by the media, which contributes to youth’s progression to the hidden situation. The ideology of “promising youth” constructed and enunciated by the media Hong Kong is a knowledge-based capitalist society (Lau 2003). To promote the well-being and development of society, it is reasonable that capable learners are desired by society (Education Commission 2000; Mok 2003). Promising youth, who are academically excellent, have professional qualifications and are viewed as highly contributive to society (Chan and Lo 2010), appear to provide a good fit and, thus, these youths are viewed as “good”, “legal” and “holy” (Roberts 1993: 171). The high level of social recognition of promising youth is well demonstrated by the Ten Outstanding Young Persons Award, which acknowledges the achievements and contributions of the awardees (Ten Outstanding Young Persons Selection 2014). This award can be viewed as a deliberate attempt by the dominant class to strengthen the socially constructed ideology of promising youth and legitimise social censure over the youth (Sumner 1990a). Under media reporting, the image of promising youth becomes even more prominent, as media reporting tends to sanctify these youths. A classic example is presented below in relation to Lui Yue-jun: Lui Yue-jun, one of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons in 2006, used to be a drug addict and a member of triad society, and yet he changed; he became a “good student”, eventually achieving outstanding results at university following his gaining of only satisfactory results in the HKCEE, when he undertook his studies for the second time (Singpao 2009). As seen in the above excerpt from a news report, strong adjectives such as “good” and “outstanding” are associated with this individual’s performance in the public examination. This represents a moral judgement (Sumner 1990a) in that the prerequisite of being “good” involves putting on a good academic performance.

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Apart from the reporting on promising youth, it can be seen that the media has enlarged the censuring effect by devoting significant coverage to deviant youth. For example, The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups (2009) conducted the “Deviant Behavior of Youth in Hong Kong” study, which comprehensively investigated the deviant behaviour committed by the youth, such as drinking, fighting, smoking and copying homework. It was emphasised in the study’s results that over 70% of the 300 participants (aged ten to 24) had sworn and around 60% had copied homework from schoolmates (The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups 2009). The report heavily denounced (Sumner 1990a) these kinds of deviant behaviours as “wrongdoing”, and urged the correcting and regulating (Sumner 1990a) of these youths by nurturing their good, moral character. This report was mentioned in Mingpao (2010) as follows: “…although some ‘bad’ behaviour such as jumping queues and swearing is not law-breaking, it affects the healthy development of young people. Hence, they are classified as deviant behaviours in some research.” Associating the adjectives “bad” and “deviant” to certain behaviours emphasises the negative consequence of committing these forms of behaviours, their heavy denunciation and the determination to stop them (Sumner 1990a). From the social censure perspective, these young people taken on an image deviant from the socially desired promising youth by appearing lazy and rebellious; thus they are disapproved of (Sumner 1990a). From the above, it is evident that the media acts as a spokesman affirming the dominant discourses of promising youth, and even enlarges the censuring effect by using particular adjectives to glorify the promising youth, while demonising the deviant youth. This differentiates the “deviant”, the “pathologic” and the “delinquent” from the “normal”, the “good”, the “legal” and the “worthy” (Roberts 1993: 171). As such, the dichotomy of promising youth and deviant youth is produced. Labels of hidden youth from professionals/experts The phenomenon of hidden youth originated in Japan with the group of youths known as the hikikomori (Saito 1998). This naming of the phenomenon led to the emergence of various studies investigating the

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characteristics surrounding youths who remain in a prolonged hidden situation. Summarising the Japanese studies, the various factors relating to hikikomori can be categorised into two streams: clinically related causes (e.g. Borovoy 2008; Hattori 2013; Kaneko 2006; Ryall 2003; Norasakkunkit and Uchida 2014; Suwa et al. 2003; Takasu et al. 2011; Tateno et al. 2012; Teo 2012) and non-clinically related causes (e.g. Austin 2000; Dziesinski 2003, 2004; Furlong 2008; Kaneko 2006; Lewis 2004; Zielenziger 2002). Although various reasons for hikikomori have been identified, a negative image of hikikomori has been portrayed, describing these youths as pathologic and psychiatrically ill, as having an abnormal lifestyle, as being parasitic and over-dependent on their families, and as being too mentally weak to cope with environmental adversity. When the phenomenon was first identified in Hong Kong in 2004 (Chan and Lo 2010), the young people entrapped within this phenomenon were named young people in social withdrawal by Wong and Ying (2005). Similar to the Japanese definitions, Wong and Ying (2006) described these young people as staying in prolonged seclusion and refusing to maintain most social relationships. They added that young people were likely to be engaging in social withdrawal if they: (1) had retreated from social connections and participation in school or work; (2) were experiencing social exclusion or isolation; and (3) were discriminated against due to their demographic background, in relation to age, class and ethnicity, for at least 3 months (Wong and Ying 2006). They further localised the definitions by classifying social withdrawal into different levels (i.e. total withdrawal cases, withdrawal cases and marginal cases based on the youths’ level of social status, relationships maintained with social institutions, and relationships maintained with other people and significant others) (Wong and Ying 2006). According to their descriptions, these young people were NEET (i.e. not in employment, education or training (Tsutsui 2008: 16), precipitated by their failure to adapt to school or work, and most (some 70% of the participants in their study) engaged in the prolonged use of computers. Moreover, most hidden youths (about 94% of the participants in their study) came from the lower class and experienced insufficient financial support.

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In  addition, in some extreme cases, these youths ignored self-hygiene and took irregular meals (Wong and Ying 2006). The Salvation Army Yaumatei Integrated Service for Young People (Wong and Ying 2006) employed the depression scale of DSM-IV to assess cases of hidden youth, thus implying an association between being hidden and depression. All of these descriptions portray a negative image of these young people as having psychiatric problems, a lack of social status (i.e. “Double-loss”), low education levels, skill levels and levels of motivation (i.e. “Three-lows”), and as being vulnerable, socially isolated, abnormal, Internet-addicted and poor. Media labels of hidden youth Under the reporting of the media, the discourses and labels of the professionals or experts not only reappear in news reports but also look quite different. Search results achieved using the WiseNews search engine showed 3268 news reports (in the Hong Kong context) published from 1 January 2004 to 30 September 2015. As shown in Table 1, the labels enunciated by the media can be divided into four categories. The first is the directly enunciated label (i.e. “three-lows”), which is a direct duplication of a label offered by the professionals (e.g. the appearance of “low education” in news headlines came from the “NEET” description provided by Wong and Ying in 2006). The second is the exaggerated label, which is created out of an association of adjectives with factual information during reporting (e.g. associating the total population of “18,000” with the words “tripled” and “increasingly serious” generates the image that the problem of hidden youth is a worrying “bomb” in society). The third is the associated label, which is generated by incorporating relevant associations into the phenomenon of hidden youth (e.g. associating “Train Man”1 with hidden youth due to their shared characteristics in terms of the prolonged use of the internet (although “being hidden” does not equate with geek or otaku)). The fourth is the distorted label, which is solely created by the media without support from the professionals and scholars (e.g. the association between “drug-taking” and being hidden, mentioned in news reports, has not been investigated in existing research). From the above, it can be seen that the media not only directly reports on the discourses and

The Social Censure of Hidden Youth in Hong Kong     151 Table 1  Summary of news reports on hidden youth and negative social labels Labels

Media Headlines Invoking ‘Hidden Youth’ Labels/Themes

Three-Lows “Low education level, low skill level (a label directly enunciated by experts) and low level of motivation” (2005) “Having a low education level leads to difficulty in finding jobs; the number of hidden youths is suspected to be increasing” (2009) “Period of social withdrawal averages two years; 70% of hidden youths have a low education level” (2009) “Youths with low educational levels suffer unemployment for seven years” (2009) “HKCEE candidates with “Three-lows” should brace up” (2009) “A hidden person being unemployed for five years suffers from a deterioration in speaking ability” (2010) The ‘bomb’ in society (a label exaggerated by the media)

“The population of “hidden youth” reaches 110,000” (2004) “The number of “hidden youths” who refuse school or work and indulge in the internet all day triples in two years” (2007) “Hidden youths staying at home and playing on the computer all day triples in two years and reaches 18,000” (2007) “The problem of ‘hidden youth’ becomes increasingly serious” (2007) “Agencies plead for more resources to alleviate the worsening problem of hidden youth” (2009) “Over 10,000 hidden youths need to be saved from this difficult situation” (2010) “Hidden youth knowing no way to seek help easily end up in a dead end” (2010) (continued)

152     G.H. Chan and T. Wing Lo Table 1  (continued) Labels

Media Headlines Invoking ‘Hidden Youth’ Labels/Themes

Train Man (label assigned by the media)

“Increase in the number of ‘Train Man’ hackers observed” (2006) “‘Train Men’ who do not interact with other people easily end up in a dead end” (2006) “‘Train Man’ sentenced to a community service order for hacking into a girl’s computer in order to chase her” (2007) “Girl avoided ‘Train Man’ by calling for ambulance” (2008) “‘Train Men’ cause girls to avoid the computer industry” (2009)

Suicide (label distorted by the media)

“‘Why should I live without a friend?’ Missing ‘hidden youth’ suspected of having jumped into the sea in Tsing Yi” (2007) “Trainee became “hidden youth” and committed suicide due to difficulty in seeking jobs: Government only assists students with university degrees” (2009) “Another hidden youth jumps off building” (2009) “Putting a plastic bag over his head, hidden youth found dead in his bed” (2010)

Mental illness (label distorted by the media)

“Avoiding keen competition in society triggers the development of psychiatric illness; the number of hidden youth doubles” (2007) “Young students who have anxiety are prone to social withdrawal” (2008) “‘Hong Kong kids’ are condemned to ‘easily become hidden youth easily and prone to emotional disturbances” (2010) (continued)

The Social Censure of Hidden Youth in Hong Kong     153 Table 1  (continued) Labels

Media Headlines Invoking ‘Hidden Youth’ Labels/Themes

Drug-taking (label distorted by the media)

“Social workers worried that hidden youths take drugs at home” (2008) “60% of students take drugs at home in a secluded state” (2010) “Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups design anti-drugs learning kit to crack down on the increase in hidden youth drug-taking behaviour” (2010) “Online Youth Counselling saves hidden youth drug-takers” (2011) “Hidden youth drug-taking experience increases to three years; too late to discover when they have indulged in drug-taking at home” (2011) “23% of youths suffer from brain damage, losing the ability to do simple sums. Hidden youth drugtaking behaviour becomes luxurious. Hidden youth found taking high-priced cocaine in a 4-star hotel” (2011) “Enhance parent education to fight against hidden youth drug-taking” (2011)

Delinquent (label distorted by the media)

“Youth with ‘Double-loss’ suspected of breaking into school in Cheung Chau” (2009) “16-year-old youngster with ‘Doubleloss’ arrested for drug hawking in forums” (2010)

labels of hidden youth supplied by the experts, but also amplifies them and even distorts them. From the news reports of the media about hidden youth, it is evident that some labels are utilised more frequently in reporting than others. Of all the labels enunciated by the media, “bomb in society” is the

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Fig. 2  Frequency of each label reported in the media

most commonly reported label (as shown in Fig. 2). This shows that the media is emphasising hidden youth as a “serious social problem” which imposes a potential threat to social order and stability (Roberts 1993). By so negativising the hidden youth, the media creates a public fear of crime (Surette et al. 2011). The enlargement of labels by the media is likely to be caused by the media’s tendency to support dominant norms and values (Altheide 2002) and to engage in the social construction of phenomena (Altheide and Snow 1979; Berger and Luckmann 1967; Best 1995). As shown in Fig. 3, the labels of hidden youth taken from the media are contributed to by the incorporation of different dominant ideologies in news reporting. Hong Kong is a city with a mixed culture of Chinese and Western, and thus both Chinese (i.e. Confucianism) and Western values (i.e. capitalism and individualism) are upheld (Heng 1997). Under the influence of Confucianism, which values filial piety (Lee 2000), young people who lack social status (e.g. “Double-loss” and “Three-lows”) are interpreted as “selfish”, “spoiled” and “unmotivated”, since having a low social status reflects a failure to work diligently and strive for success, which brings shame to the family. Meanwhile, Hong Kong is a capitalist city (Yau 2011) which values the private ownership of property, free market mechanisms and production aimed at profit-making (Tormey 2004); it is also a knowledge-based

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Labels from experts

Ideology

Capitalism ‘Double-loss’ ‘Three-lows’

Labels from media Failure Not contributive to society Unworthy Rubbish Useless Sorrowful Problematic

Confucianism

Selfish Spoiled Unmotivated

‘prolonged use of computers’

Lazy Unmotivated Unrestrained Individualism

Parasitic Abandon own self Having no self discipline Rubbish

‘socially isolated’

Medicalisation

Pathologic Problematic

‘poor’

Consumerism

Unworthy

Fig. 3  Dominant ideologies reflected in the labels attached to hidden youth

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society (Lau 2003), which treasures academically successful elites (Education Commission 2000; Mok 2003). Under such ideologies, people who are deviant from the societal expectation to be excellent both academically and in relation to other personal achievements (e.g. “Double-loss” and “Three-lows”) will be seen as “failures”, as “not contributing to society”, and as “unworthy”, “rubbish”, “useless” and “sorrowful”. Also, under the influence of individualism, which values the individual effort of striving for achievement and success (Wong 2008), hidden youth’s “prolonged use of computers” easily allows the attachment of such labels as “lazy”, “unmotivated”, “unrestrained”, “parasitic”, “abandoning own self ”, “having no-self discipline”, and “rubbish” by the media. In addition to the above, the ideology of medicalisation, which refers to the tendency to apply medical knowledge to the analysis of behaviour and phenomenon (White 2002), appears to play a part in media reporting. Hidden youth’s “social isolation”, defined by the professionals as aforementioned, is easily medicalised as a negative attribute indicating “abnormality” and a “pathological” “problem”. In addition, the media reporting of hidden youth also appears to be influenced by consumerism, an ideology that values the pursuit of material comforts (Lebow 1955). Under this ideology, being “poor” and exerting only low-purchasing power equates to being “unworthy”. To summarise, it is evident that the originally neutral labels offered by professionals, such as “Double-loss”, “Three-lows”, “prolonged use of computers”, “socially isolated” and “poor”, are enlarged and negativised as a result of the incorporation of particular adjectives and dominant ideologies during media reporting. This reflects the role of the media in affirming the social order (Garcia-Blanco 2009; Phillips and Schrøder 2004; Sahin 2011) and enlarging the effect of social censure, triggering a moral panic amongst the general public, whereby people should attend to the “deviance” (Cohen 2002; Krinsky 2013) of hidden youth.

Application of Social Censure Social censure requires the deployment of an organised, systematic mechanism to supervise, control and indoctrinate subordinates to the

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socially desired norms (Sumner 1990a), in order that these subordinates may become “docile” (Foucault 1975: 138), may become the overseers of their own deviant behaviour, and may have the power to resist censuring diminished (Sumner 1990a). This also occurs within the context of hidden youth in Hong Kong. In the following, the illustrations are divided into institutions and surveillants, so as to show how these two components form a censuring mechanism framework which is enacted over the youth/hidden youth.

Institutions As expressed by Foucault (1977a), the policing of delinquent acts requires “perpetual surveillance” which allows supervision (281); also, the “penal apparatus” involved in the differentiation of delinquent actors applies various “tactics” aimed at disciplining the “targets” (Foucault 1977a: 285). The social censure of hidden youth in Hong Kong likewise involves sophisticated systematic management aimed at signifying, denouncing and regulating (Roberts 1993; Sumner 1990a) these youth, as well as enforcing social control. In the context of hidden youth in Hong Kong, the agencies of policy-making, the police force, social service agencies, school and family, are the institutions that typically maintain relationships with the youth. Applying Althusser’s (1970) concepts, the police force is a form of repressive state apparatus that uses force as a means to exert social control (Lo 1993a, 2017), whereas the other three institutions are ideological state apparatus which achieve social control through the dissemination of ideologies (Althusser 1970). In Hong Kong, the Labor and Welfare Bureau is responsible for implementing employment projects and increasing the employability of the youth (The HKSAR Government 2015); also, the Youth Employment and Training Programme has been implemented to offer employment training for “young school leavers aged 15 to 24” (Labour Department 2014). These policies and measures aim to encourage the smooth transition of youth into the labour market, which can be viewed as an attempt to nurture promising youth who pragmatically contribute to society (Chan and Lo 2010). The police force is mainly

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responsible for maintaining social order by arresting people, including youths, who engage in delinquent activities and ensures the compliance of individuals with law and order (The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups 2014; Hong Kong Police Force 2015). The social service agencies for youth operate on the principles of early identification and intervention (e.g. Integrated Children and Youth Services Centres, School Social Work Service, District Youth Outreaching Social Work Service), services for timely support (e.g. Hotline service, Overnight Outreaching Service for Young Night Drifters) and services for steering young people back onto the right course (Community Support Service Scheme), aimed at promoting the normal, healthy development of young people and nurturing them to become responsible, contributive individuals in society (Lo et al. 2005). Meanwhile, schools, as part of the education system, are mainly responsible not only for enhancing students’ learning skills and competencies but also for socialising students to become responsible and contributive members of society (Education Bureau 2012). Finally, the family represents the fundamental agent of socialisation (Macionis 2006), aimed at indoctrinating children into social norms and morality (Parke et al. 1994). In summarising the roles performed by the above four institutions, it is evident that the institutions work on affirming the societal expectations and standards of “promising youth” and socialising the youth into the socially desired ideologies. Apart from socialisation, the institutions enact social censure on the youth by dealing with deviant or delinquent actors (Chan and Lo 2016a; Lo et al. 2011; Wong et al. 2002). For example, the education system in Hong Kong is meritocratic and discriminative by nature, with only limited opportunities provided for students to pursue higher level or tertiary education (Poon and Wong 2008). The elimination of unqualified, ineligible students reflects a punishment of these deviant youths. Moreover, some youth services in Hong Kong are targeted specifically at youthsat-risk (e.g. the District Youth Outreaching Social Work Service and the Overnight Outreaching Service for Young Night Drifters) and youths who have a history of committing delinquent acts (e.g. the Community Support Service Scheme) (Lo et al. 2005, 2006). There are also services specific to the hidden youth, including (1) “LETS Walk” (“Life Engagement

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Training Service”) of the Hong Kong Christian Service, which aims to reconnect hidden youths with society and helps rebuild a sense of wellbeing in these youth through the implementation of a comprehensive service model (Hong Kong Christian Service 2007); (2) “Animal Attraction— Creature Comforts’’, which aims to enhance the self-confidence of hidden youths and equip them with various skills through which their employability can be enhanced (Chinese Evangelical Zion Church Social Service Division 2010); (3) “Withdrawn Youth Support Network Enhancement Project”, which aims to help hidden youths establish support networks and acquire skills so that they can resume a meaningful life (Hong Kong Christian Service 2011); and (4) the Cyber Youth Outreach Project, which aims to intervene with the youth and particularly with the hidden youth (The HKSAR Government 2010, 2015). All of these services show how the various institutions also strengthen social control by examining, preventing, punishing and correcting deviant behaviour (Roberts 1993; Sumner 1990b) by eliminating the deviant behaviour, and even the hidden behaviour, and reengaging these youths into mainstream society.

Surveillants The term “surveillants” refers to the adults who “work for” the state apparatus. In the context of hidden youth, they are the police officers, the social workers/counsellors, teachers and parents who enact social censure over the youth (Chan 2013). Although they can be viewed as “executors”, mobilised by the dominant class to justify their policing of hidden youth, they are at the same time “docile bodies” (Foucault 1975: 138). Under the influence of the media, they are constantly taught by the professionals about the societal standards and norms, as well as the “potential dangers” posed by those who are deviant or delinquent. As such, they have gradually internalised the dominant discourses and have become compliant with the socially recognised norms. That being so, surveillants themselves are products of the power enacted by the dominant class, and their internalised normalised judgements also become a form of power that produces further suppressed subjectivity (Foucault 1980a) in the youth. Thus, in order to maintain law and order—that

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is, to ensure every youth moves along the pathway towards “promising youth”—they supervise, differentiate, regulate and punish (Roberts 1993) those who are deviant. Through daily interactions with the youth, they transmit the dominant discourses of “promising youth” and indoctrinate them into role models as a means by which to enforce social control while watching out for and disciplining deviant targets. Under this power and knowledge exerted by the surveillants (Foucault 1980a, b), all youths are “caught up” (Foucault 1977a: 202) in the overseeing management mechanism long before they become deviant youth or even hidden youth. These youths find themselves in an unequal power relationship (Foucault 1980b), facing control and discipline throughout the developmental process. “Where there is power, there is resistance” (Foucault 1980b: 101); during the developmental process of becoming hidden youth, the youth engage in various forms of resistance (e.g. more frequent truancy) against the surveillants’ power exertion before adapting their hidden behaviour as an ultimate form of resistance. Despite this, Sumner (1990a: 27–28) implies the possibility of negotiation between the powerful parties and the subordinates. Sumner (1990a) asserts that the denunciations of the dominant “are subject to continuous resentment, resistance, and redefinition by these oppositions” (27–28). In order to exploit the resistant power throughout the struggle for hegemony, the dominant class continuously attempts to justify its actions by repressing the offenders and educating them in the ways of the desired behaviours. If subordinates insist on resisting, dominant agencies “try to destroy, colonize or police their cultures, until the control and regulation is overthrown or falls into disuse” (Sumner 1990a: 27–28). This evidences the continuous negotiation of the dominant parties with the subordinates, in an effort to oppress and win over them (Sumner 1990a). Thus, the power of the dominant and the resistance of the subordinates are in an endless battle of mutual influence. Based on Foucault’s (1980a, b) and Sumner’s (1990a) theoretical foundations, these dynamic interactions between the surveillants and the youth/hidden youth in Hong Kong can be explored in terms of power and resistance (Foucault 1980a, b), as well as negotiation (Sumner 1990a), which helps to illuminate how the youth chooses to be hidden

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as an ultimate means by which to cope up with the power and discipline employed within social censure. In the following, the enactment of surveillants’ discipline as well as the youth’s responses to that discipline throughout the developmental process is illustrated, in terms of the three different stages of deviant youth, youth in seclusion and hidden youth. N denotes the number of respondents in the respective category.

Stage of Deviant Youth Surveillants It can be seen that the surveillants have internalised the dominant discourses of promising youth and deviant youth enunciated by the media. They agree with the image of promising youth as outstanding (N = 34), as having good career prospects (N = 23), as having high professional qualifications (N = 21), as being obedient (N = 16), as being pragmatic and having normal behaviour (N = 16), as valuing filial piety (N = 14) and as being able to live independently (N = 13). Additionally, they agree with the image of deviant youth as lazy (N = 35), rebellious (N = 30), academically poor (N = 27) and bad (N = 14). In an effort to develop the youth into “promising youth”, different surveillants deploy various management strategies. Initially, they “induce a permanent visibility” (Foucault 1977a: 201) in areas, such as school, home and other public places, to watch out for the youth. They look for cues of deviance of the youth based on the following features: “absence from school at abnormal times” (e.g. Teacher C1); and rule-breaking acts such as “hairdyeing” (e.g. Teacher C2). Students displaying these characteristics are viewed as norm-breaking, as they are deviant from the characteristics of the “promising youth”. In order to facilitate their management of the youth, different surveillants set their own rules or principles, and operate their regulations accordingly. For police officers and social workers, students who “look immature” (Police B) and “wear school uniform lingering in the streets” (Police A, Police B) are targets of social censure. In an effort to manage these youths, they apply such interventions (N = 3) as “talking to

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them” (Police B) and “asking them why they are absent from school” (Police A, Social Worker F). The teachers manage their students based on “academic achievement” and “presence at school” (N = 7). Students who “are occasionally absent from school” (e.g. Counsellor D) and “have poor results” (Teacher J) become the targets of social censure because they violate the mainstream standards of “promising youth”. Hence, to regulate and manage these students, they deploy “different kinds of treatment”, “based on the degree of deviance” (e.g. Teacher J). Examples of discipline include “meeting with parents” (N = 10), issuing “records of demerit” (N = 7), “scolding” (N = 5), “detention” (N = 3) and even “calling the police if the students are found delinquent” (e.g. Teacher J) (N = 4). Meanwhile, parents manage their children based on their “conduct” (N = 17), their “presence at home at appropriate times” (N = 14) and their “academic results” (N = 11). In an effort to prevent their children from becoming “deviant”, they deploy different kinds of disciplinary strategies, such as “checking their homework to prevent them from skipping homework” (e.g. Mother N) and “calling the school when children have not returned home” (e.g. Mother F) (N = 4). Faced with the youth’s deviance, the deployment of punishment is inevitable (Wong and Lo 2002). Examples include “deprivation of freedom” (Youth 20) (N = 15), “doing exercises” (Youth 01) (N = 8) and “cleaning up” (N = 11), all aimed at bringing to an end such deviant behaviours as truancy and poor academic results. All of the above regulations and disciplinary strategies reflect the surveillants’ use of power over the youth, based on their superiority. They treat youths’ bodies as targets of the exercise of power (Foucault 1975, 1980a) with the aim of transforming youths’ bodies from “lazy” and “bad” to manageable (Foucault 1975). It is observed that some youths engage in frequent school refusal as a coping response to the surveillants’ power and discipline. Despite this, these youths remain “visible” to the surveillants. In order to put an end to their increasingly serious rule-violating behaviour, the disciplinary control over these youth becomes aggravated. Based on their understanding of the hidden youth’s characteristics, including refusing to maintain social connections and participations and the prolonged use of the internet (Wong and Ying 2006), they employ interventions

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accordingly. For example, some teachers “ask the students why they skip school” (e.g. Teacher L, Counsellor D) and “indulge in the internet” (e.g. Teacher L), while others conduct “home-visits”, “transfer them to other social welfare agencies for further intervention” and “warn them about the serious consequences of their truancy” (e.g. Social Worker G). To ensure 24-hour intervention, collaboration among surveillants is commonly found (N = 32). For example, it is apparent that parents serve as surveillants outside school whereas teachers are the surveillants responsible for the youth’s behaviour at school (e.g. Teacher D, Father G). They collaborate with one another to provide all-round supervision over the youth, to “facilitate mutual understanding of the youth’s behaviour” and to “find solutions to their problems” (e.g. Mother C). This collaboration can be viewed as an act designed to strengthen the systematic management of the youth, so as to ensure that all targets remain under surveillance (Foucault 1977a, b). Youth Youths at this stage suffer severely as a result of the limited space and activity, the continuous hierarchical surveillance, and the various forms of punishment meted out as a means by which to prevent their deviant behaviour (Foucault 1980a, b; Sumner 1990b). With resistance being employed alongside the emergence of power (Foucault 1980b), deviant youth engage in a variety of resistance against surveillants’ discipline. Some employ behavioural resistance to show dissatisfaction (N = 11) and ignore surveillants’ views (N = 6), without fearing surveillants’ disciplinary power. Examples of behavioural resistance include “copying homework” (Youth 01), “stealing their money in return for the deprivation of pocket money as punishment” (Youth 04) and “refusing to study any subjects” (Youth 09). “Refusing to study any subjects” (Youth 09) might even be viewed as a way to force the surveillants to bend to their will. All these forms of resistance are active behavioural strategies, used to demonstrate the youth’s protest against the surveillants’ power. Despite this, a number of youths also display an acceptance of the norms indoctrinated by their significant others (Bala 1998). They identify with the “deviant” labels imposed by the surveillants (e.g. “lazy”, “rubbish” and “naughty”) and believe that they are “losers” (N = 40),

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“failures” (N = 35) and not “worthy” (N = 25) because they are not “qualified” in terms of academic achievement and/or career development (e.g. Youth 07). Also, they “feel lonely” (Youth 02) and feel they are “not understood by their parents”. Their feelings of despair and helplessness indicate their passive forms of resistance.

Stage of Youth in Seclusion Surveillants Despite the fact that youths at this stage engage in increasing levels of school refusal and even progress to seclusion, they remain under the supervision of surveillants, including teachers, social workers and parents. Agitated by the fear of delinquency (Cohen 2002; Krinsky 2013) and the fear that the youth will become hidden youth, the various surveillants continue to look for cues identifying a youth’s “hidden situation”, for the sake of signifying, excluding and implementing the management of these deviant targets (Roberts 1993; Sumner 1990a). The surveillants agree that hidden youths display various symptoms, such as being “Double-loss” (N = 39) and “Three-lows” (N = 36), and exercising “prolonged use of the Internet” (N = 26), as described by scholars and the media. Hence, they signify the hidden youth by using corresponding cues of deviance, such as “prolonged seclusion at home” (e.g. Father E) (N = 31), “Internet-indulgence” (N = 26), “abnormality” (e.g. Mother B, Social Worker B, Social Worker L) (N = 21), a “lack of social skills” (e.g. Social Worker C, Father E) (N = 19), and “ignoring self-hygiene” (e.g. Father E) (N = 14). Labels such as “prolonged seclusion at home” and “ignoring self-hygiene” are derived from Wong and Ying’s (2006) descriptions, whereas labels such as “unsociable”, “lacking in social skills”, “abnormal” and “Internet-indulgent” can be traced to news reports about the “Train Man”; these youths are knowledgeable about computers, retreat from social interactions and are feared by girls (Chan and Lo 2010). Fearing that the youths, who are potentially Double-loss youths, will eventually become hidden youths, as posited by scholars (Wong and Ying 2005, 2006), the surveillants work hard to prevent their further

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deviance by paying close attention to the youth’s engagement in truancy (N = 6) and their period of seclusion at home (N = 19), and by integrating them into society by such means as applying for a place in the Youth Employment and Training Programme (N = 15). Youth As aforementioned, some surveillants consider the hidden youth to be “abnormal” and marginalise them. Even where youths wish to be “reborn” and returned to society (e.g. by re-entering school), they feel that the stigma cannot be “purified”. As Faris and Felmlee (2014: 228) mention, “socially vulnerable youth are frequently harassed for violating norms…”; some youth (N = 17) feel they are discriminated against. For example, Youth 38 expressed the following: “Apparently, society welcomes everyone who has the will to work and contribute, but… those people are stupid…society excludes them while pushing them to act according to societal standards…many people have tried that, but they fall into the vicious cycle again, feeling puzzled”. This account corresponds with those of the teacher surveillants, who express the wish to have hidden youths expelled from school owing to their continuous school refusal. For instance, Teacher K said, “If they [the students] are absent from school for 3 days, they break the school rules. Usually we report these cases to the discipline teachers, talk to their parents and give the students a demerit. If they do it without good reason, we have the right to expel them from school”. This indicates a complete marginalisation of the hidden youth from the education system and makes them feel there is no way to which they can return to mainstream society; as a result, they progress to a hidden situation. Because of the labels and stigmas imposed by adults, these youth are excluded and marginalised from society (Goffman 1963), and it becomes difficult for them to exit this “deviant” position (Brown 1991; Sanders 2007). Survelliants’ further suppression of the youth at this stage can be viewed as a means not only to differentiate them from the promising youth but also to “destroy” and “colonize their cultures” (Sumner 1990a: 27–28); that is, they eliminate the youth’s resistant power by discriminating against them and depriving them of individual choices.

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Adhered to the labelling theory (Becker 1963), the aggravated deviance committed by the youth through their progression from merely deviant to seclusion gradually brings upon them a severe, punitive stigma which ultimately changes their self-concept. As a result, the youth is no longer able to re-conform to the mainstream standards of “promising youth”, instead of becoming hidden youth as a form of social adaptation.

Stage of Hidden Youth Surveillants Upon witnessing a youth becoming a hidden youth, some surveillants (N = 21) expressed their intention to intervene (e.g. Social Worker B, Social Work L, Teacher G, Father E), by providing services to help the youth re-engage with society. However, some other surveillants, such as teachers (N = 10), felt helpless when facing a youth’s progression into the hidden situation, because they felt it was difficult to re-engage these youths into society, compared to the typical deviant youth. Thus, they displayed signs of abandoning the hidden youth. For some surveillants, the hidden youth were difficult to approach (e.g. Counsellor D, Counsellor F, Social Worker I) and manage (e.g. Teacher I), and so they gave up with their interventions (e.g. Teacher I). They viewed hidden youths as “hopeless” cases. This reflects the surveillants’ attempt to transfer the caretaking responsibility to the family, and even attribute the problem to the hidden youths themselves. One parent, Father F, expressed his severe anger with his son: “I’m in charge of this family. If he [my son] insists on hiding at home all day rather than being at work, fine. He should leave my home. He should not treat me as his dad anymore. He should do whatever he wants!” All these acts constitute a “marking out” (differentiation) between “abnormal” hidden youths and “good” and “worthy” youths (Roberts 1993: 171). In this stage, the family becomes the only surveilllant to discipline hidden youths, owing to their detachment from society. Nevertheless, parents adopt a much milder attitude to hidden youths (N = 17). For example, their judgements and demands shift from “expecting their children to become ‘promising’” to “hoping that they are not ‘parasites’”

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(e.g. Mother J, Father D). Mother H even expressed the fact that she “had talked with her son”. “Talking to each other” (Mother H) indicates that negotiation does take place between parents and hidden youths, in which the parents hope to make their requirements of the youth more convincing. As mentioned by Mother H, her son “started to care about her feelings, not always doing everything according to his own will”. Her son “would do housework; he would turn up and have dinner with the family when there were guests visiting them”. All these adjustments made by the surveillants reflect the attempt by these adults to justify their control over the youth in a mild manner. On the other hand, some other surveillants have also “softened” their attitude towards the hidden youth. For instance, Counsellor F states that she “turns a blind eye when hidden youths miss appointments or give up their jobs after a short time”. This shows a sign of adaptation, as they feel their power becoming increasingly inapplicable in terms of correcting youths’ social withdrawal behaviour. Counsellor F even expressed the fact that she simply “passed the case out”, indicating her inability to control the youth. Furthermore, a paradox is identified from the empirical data. It is found that, although the surveillants had well-internalised the dominant discourses of hidden youth, they were not aware of the contradictions contained within the discourses, and showed an insufficiently thorough understanding of hidden youth. The below verbatim accounts of Social Worker A and Social Worker E serve as examples: Social Worker E: “…in fact, we receive few cases of hidden youth in the community. We don’t even have cases from our outreach service. Those we are usually in contact with are Class 1 and Class 2 cases. Those in Class 1 are marginalised hidden youths, which is common. Those in Class 2 are high-risk youths, which is common too. Those who don’t even step outside of their homes and maintain communication solely with family are rare. Although Social Worker E was clearly mindful of the categorisation of hikikomori (i.e. total withdrawal cases, withdrawal cases and marginal cases, as defined by Wong and Ying 2006), she was not able to locate any hidden youths in need of counseling services who did not step outside of the home and maintained communication solely with family.

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Facing the reality, she avoided saying that “the youths with whom she engaged were mostly not real cases of hidden youth”, but instead insisted that those she is “usually in contact with are Class 1 and Class 2 cases” and those “who don’t even step outside of their homes and maintain communication solely with family are rare”. This reflects her internalisation of the scholars’ discourses but an insufficient understanding of the true nature of hidden youth. Also, Social Worker E showed a low sense of challenge towards the truthfulness of the dominant discourses, which reflects the nature of social censure as “moral categories which, if relied upon as descriptive, will automatically undermine scientific enquiry” (Thompson 1975: 193–194). Investigator:

“ What do you think if…this is compared with other youth problems…according to your experience, why are rich people with no work not defined as a kind of youth problem? Or are they a kind of youth problem?…” Social worker A:   “em…it should be said that…rich people without work…why are rich people with no work not defined as a kind of youth problem?…Those who are rich can live by themselves, even when they do not work. Basically, they don’t cause any problems, since they do not affect other people. Also, hidden youth mostly come from the lower-class…why are they called “hidden youth”? Maybe…how should I explain it? …Yet, even the “hidden” rich can cause serious social problems. It is the same…”

From the above conversation, it is evident that Social Worker A had reflected little upon about why being hidden was viewed as “deviant”. It appears that hidden youths are generally poor according to the descriptions of Wong and Ying (2006); however, no one has ever inquired into the possibility of hidden youths having home-based work and earning money. According to Chan and Lo (2016), nearly half (49.3%) and

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around 15% of the 363 hidden youth participants in their study did have the ability to earn and had a full-time job on the internet, respectively. Viewing “rich” hidden youths as non-deviant, Social Worker A displayed a strong internalisation of capitalist, materialistic values; he also showed a low sense of challenge towards the dominant surrounding the characteristics of hidden youth. Hidden youth The hidden youths demonstrated a realisation that they were marginalised by the surveillants. As expressed by Youth 35, “being a former hidden youth made him lose his job as a private tutor, as the student’s mother worried that her son would be influenced by him”. Being abandoned by the surveillants and knowing that they were unsuitable for mainstream society (e.g. Youth 37), youths found retreating into their own space to be the only way out (e.g. Youth 28, Youth 29, Youth 37) (N = 11). Also, they found being hidden advantageous (e.g. Youth 34) (N = 13) as, having found their preferred lifestyle in the hidden situation, they no longer believed themselves to be problematic (e.g. Youth 28), but rather enjoyed enhanced self-esteem (N = 9). Some hidden youths not only accepted being totally cut off (Roberts 1993) from mainstream society but also made use of their hidden youth identity to “cool the mark out” (Goffman 1952: 451)—thus taking advantage of the negative stigmas attached to them by society (N = 17). Hidden youths enjoyed their status of being hidden (N = 17) and unwilling to re-integrate into society (e.g. Youth 28). Also, they did not care about the negative side of the attached stigmas, as they brought about certain advantages, such as “having the freedom to be my own self ” (e.g. Youth 36). The hidden youth showed a release in subjectivity. This is reflected in their anger towards the surveillants. As expressed by Youth 28, “the bad things of hidden youth are created by adults”. This shows that some hidden youths attribute their failure to adapt to society to adults, not themselves. Some hidden youths were evidently annoyed (N = 11) and “angry” (N = 5) with surveillants’ control over and interventions in their lifestyle (e.g. Youth 20, Youth 32) and felt misunderstood by the adults (e.g. Youth 20, Youth 32). Youth 32 stated that he was satisfied

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with his home-based work but that “the social worker said that she would introduce me to another job that was more acceptable to my parents”. This reveals his underlying feeling of not being appreciated by the mainstream surveillants. All these responses indicate the engagement of active behavioural resistance against suppressive power and a release of the subjectivity of hidden youths (Foucault 1982). On the other hand, although hidden youths felt annoyed by the surveillants’ intervention, they simultaneously felt obliged to fulfil the societal demand for “filial piety” (e.g. Youth 34). For example, they felt uncomfortable adapting to society’s demands but nevertheless started to understand their parents’ points of view and the meaning of their discipline (e.g. Youth 34, Youth 36) (N = 13). As expressed by Youth 34, he would “attend the family gatherings and be an ‘obedient’ child, so that his parents would not lose face in front of the relatives”. Some (e.g. Youth 33) even weighed up the potential gains and losses of engaging in resistance, eventually selecting the coping strategy that best accommodated the needs of themselves and their parents: “I can do nothing. I’m still dependent on their [the parents’] financial support. It’s okay if I continue to resist fiercely, but I feel tired…so what’s the point of doing that? Think about it this way: if they accept the way you are now, why don’t you do what they want as if you were working for a living? It’s much better than working outside!” The above actions demonstrate that the longer youths maintain the hidden situation, the less they engage in fierce resistance. Instead, they succeed in finding a way to adapt to family demands while having their own needs satisfied. This indicates a negotiation, in which youths are willing to accept the “conditions” offered by the adults, who attempt to make their demands and are more persuasive to the youths.

Consequence of Social Censure Under social censure, a differentiation is made between the good, the normal and the bad, with deviance being a definite result (Sumner 1990a). In the case of the hidden youth in Hong Kong, deviant youth/ youth in seclusion/hidden youth are marked out as deviants under

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social censure. Moreover, in the context of hidden youth in Hong Kong, it is found that they undergo changes in their levels of self-esteem and subjectivity when they experience cycles of censuring or situations of combat with the surveillants throughout their progression to the hidden situation. This change is illustrated in the following sections. The censuring effect experienced by the youth throughout the developmental process At the stage of deviant youth, whilst some youths display active forms of resistance (e.g. refusing to accept the surveillants’ demands, teaching and instructions), some display passive forms of resistance, having internalised the negative labels imposed by the surveillants (e.g. viewing themselves as “lazy” (N = 32) and “bad” (N = 26)). The youth’s internalisation of the negative labels shows that they experience a high level of censuring under the influence of the surveillants’ evaluations (Bala 1998). This lowered sense of power to resist the censuring of the surveillants indicates the successful application of social censure (Sumner 1990a). At the stage of youth in seclusion, the youth felt differentiated and discriminated against by society (e.g. by being expelled from school) due to their increasing levels of deviance (i.e. engaging in frequent school refusal). As expressed by the youth, they received more punitive and severe denunciations from the surveillants, including being termed “useless” (N = 8), “failures” (N = 7), “losers” (N = 6) and “parasites” (N = 5), and even being told that they bring “family shame” (N = 7) due to the loss of social status brought about by their seclusion. They internalise these negative labels and their deviant role, making it feel impossible to return to mainstream society. This shows that they remain under the effect of the negative evaluations of the surveillants (Bala 1998) and, hence, when they begin to detach from their connections with society by remaining secluded at home, they experience an even more significant censuring effect as a result of the more severe signification, discrimination and punishment they suffer (Sumner 1990a, b). The enactment of social censure at this stage is still successful (Sumner 1990a). At the stage of hidden youth, although the youths are still under social censure (e.g. under the supervision and intervention of the surveillants, and stigmatisation and discrimination by the surveillants due to their

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status as a hidden youth) owing to their severe deviance from promising youth, the censuring effect experienced by them reduces significantly. The reason for this is that they here begin to accept their “deviant social status” and to make an “adjustment on the basis of the associated role” (Rubington and Weinberg 2003: 185). They either find being hidden to be the most suitable situation for them (N = 17) or make use of their hidden youth status to gain advantages (Goffman 1952) (N = 17). They begin to display more active forms of resistance (e.g. criticising the meaningfulness and usefulness of the discipline and intervention of social workers). This indicates that the effect of social censure on them starts to diminish. The changes in sense of self and identity in the youth throughout the developmental process At the stage of deviant youth, although some youth show dissatisfaction (N = 15) and resentment (N = 6) towards the surveillants’ discipline and regulation, a number of youths feel “disappointed” (N = 21) and “worry” (N = 18) at their inability to fit into the mainstream standards (e.g. gaining a university place), and display a sense of “unworthiness” (N = 25). This reflects their high internalisation of the dominant discourses of promising youth (N = 41) and deviant youth (N = 35), and a total elimination of the power required to resist the legitimacy of these discourses (Sumner 1990a). These youths have a lowered sense of self/ identity at this stage. At the stage of youth in seclusion, the youths attract more punitive social censure (e.g. being stigmatised and expelled from school), due to their loss of social status. Feeling lost in relation to their position in society, they suffer identity confusion (Li 1999), and feel “helpless” (N = 21) and puzzled (N = 7). This demonstrates their low sense of self and identity, at a level even lower than that experienced during the previous stage. Feeling this way about their social position reflects their deep internalisation of the dominant discourses of promising youth; it demonstrates that they agree with these discourses and thus their identification with their deviant roles increases (Rubington and Weinberg 2003). Youths in this stage thereby live in a suppressed state under social censure (Sumner 1990a), with their self-regulating “bio-power”

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(Foucault 1980a: 139–140), and with the knowledge that they should comply with the socially desired norms still activated. Social censure is still in effect over youths in seclusion (Sumner 1990a). At the stage of hidden youth, despite the fact that the social censure directed at them is at its most severe (due to their level of deviance being at its topmost level compared to the previous stages), the sense of self/identity of the youths alters quite dramatically. They no longer view themselves as a problem (N = 9); rather, they feel happy (N = 14) and are confident in themselves (N = 14). As expressed by Youth 20, he tried to help the social workers understand that “he was not addicted to computer games, but was happy to be able to earn money through gaming”, although he felt that the social workers did not agree with him. This shows that the hidden youths at this stage become more confident in their choice of lifestyle, and identify strongly with their preferred lifestyle of being “hidden”. This further indicates that the hidden youth experience a significantly lowered censuring effect, such that their individuality begins to free itself from suppression and the enactment of social censure becomes dysfunctional. The emergence of a subculture in the hidden situation as an ultimate form of social adaptation During the hidden situation, a number of youths engaged in the prolonged use of the internet (N = 18), so as to engage in their preferred activities (N = 4) and to relieve the feelings of frustrations brought about by society (N = 4). They also made use of the internet to interact with others and seek social support (Wallace 1999), by joining online communities and interest groups, (e.g. the RC Social Voice Network (N = 20), guilds in the online gaming platform (N = 16) and the Golden Forum (N = 13)). Gradually, they made new friends with similar background and interests, and formed their own peer groups with their own established norms and attitudes; these peer groups can be viewed as subcultures, activated so as to solve their collectively experienced problem of being censured (Brake 1985; Cohen 1955). As expressed by the youths, they participated in a wide variety of such subculture groups, including online gaming (N = 29), music (N = 13), Cosplay (N = 9), hip hop dancing (N = 7), Lolita (N = 4),

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cosmetics (N = 5), meditation (N = 5) and Wii Sports fitness groups (N = 3). These activities are all considered to belong to “non-mainstream knowledge”; they are subjugated in mainstream society and viewed as naïve, informal (Foucault 1980b) and illegitimate (Saleeby 1994) in the eyes of adults, but they are readily recognised by peers within the subculture. From these subcultures, the youths are thus able to: (1) enjoy the pursuit of their own individuality and their own preferred alternative interests (Brake 1985; Jiang 2005) (N = 27) which they find difficult to do in mainstream society (N = 21); and (2) express their opinions and show protest freely against the dominant social structure without burden (Cashmore 1984) through activities such as derivative works (N = 16). As such, they are encouraged to remain in the hidden situation as an ultimate form of social adaptation. The subcultures that the hidden youths participate in are important to them as they are thereby able to feel both a sense of achievement (N = 13) and the positive recognition of the subcultural peers of their own abilities (N = 25). The subcultural environment differs from mainstream society, where they are severely censured due to their inability to fit into the mainstream standards. As a result of this change in environment (activated when they retreat from mainstream society to the hidden situation), hidden youths experience a change in their sense of self and identity (Burn 1979). Under the influence of the positive evaluations received from their subcultural peers (Bala 1998), they are able to reconstruct their identities (Brake 1980, 1985). Their negative identities (e.g. “losers”, “failures”, “rubbish” and “family shame”) are thereby overwritten by these new positive identities, and they instead attract “important” (N = 15), “contributive” (N = 13), “valuable” (N = 13), “leader” (N = 10) and “capable” (N = 6) identities. In recognising their achievements and contributions, thanks to their subcultural peers, their sense of disempowerment and their feelings that they are useless and roleless (Kam 2009; Liuet al. 2009) in the mainstream society are reduced, and a sense of powerfulness (Staples 1990) and usefulness is regained. Also, the unfolding of their individuality and subjectivity within the subcultural platforms aids them in their re-establishment of a sense of identity, in which they can view themselves as different (Tsai 1997) from others but not inferior, due to their deviation

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from the promising youth. As expressed by Youth 01, “Why do I have to be a good student or a good employee? Why can’t I be a guy who hates going out?…” This highlights the hidden youth’s reluctance to reintegrate into mainstream society, perform the expected roles and live up to the dominant norms (N = 11). As a result, even though social censure over them is still present in mainstream society, they are no longer influenced by it. They regain the power to resist social censure from the subcultures, and so social censure becomes dysfunctional to them; their “bio-power” (Foucault 1980a: 139–140), which had previously motivated them to become a promising youth, disappears. As expressed by Youth 41, he is no longer afraid of the surveillants since they cannot control him.

Discussion and Conclusions The above results illustrate how the phenomenon of hidden youth in Hong Kong can be interpreted and analysed from the perspective of social censure, in terms of its creation, application and consequences. Throughout the three developmental stages of youth becoming hidden youth, youths, as the targets of social censure, experience continuous cycles of censuring from the dominant parties. In an effort to nurture youths towards becoming promising youths, and to prevent them from being deviant, the dominant parties impose a systematic, organised mechanism to manage the youths, which in fact contributes to their progression into seclusion, and even a prolonged hidden situation, as a coping response. In the following, the elements and theoretical concepts of social censure are applied, to consolidate the illustrations in the findings section and offer a comprehensive picture of how social censure occurs and is operated in the context of hidden youth in Hong Kong. As reported by Becker (1963: 9), “deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’”. This means that deviant behaviour is “deviant” not because of its nature, but because of its violation of norms. In the case of hidden youth in Hong Kong, “being hidden” was neutral and not attended to until 2004, when Wong and Ying  (2005)

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coined the phenomenon of young people in social withdrawal and provided definitions of this group of youths in the local context. The authoritative descriptions constructed and offered by them, as well as by other scholars who offered relevant discourses, largely portrayed a negative image of the hidden youth; they were described as having a loss of social status, as engaging in the prolonged use of computers, they were poor and ignored self-hygiene. These labels deviate significantly from the prevalent, long-supported ideologies of Capitalism, Individualism and Confucianism which all value the effort of individuals to strive for success, personal achievement and family honour (Heng 1997). As a result, these youths have attracted the negative public image of being “not contributive to society”, “failures”, “rubbish”, “sorrowful”, “unworthy”, “useless”, “lazy” and “parasitic”, which is highly deviant from the image of promising youth who have high academic qualifications and are beneficial to the well-being and development of the capitalist society (Chan and Lo 2010). As such, hidden youths are viewed as posing a danger to society and threatening the political interests of the dominant class, and thus they have become the targets of social censure (Sumner 1990a). As Sumner expressed, “censures of crime and deviance are irredeemably suffused with ideology” (Sumner 1990a: 22), and as such the social censure of hidden youth is grounded by the ideologies related to the promising youth, who are socially constructed as “good” “role models”, as these youths are proximal to the political interests of the dominant class (Sumner 1990a). Grounded by the socially constructed ideologies, the dominant class receives “justification for repressive action against the offender” (Sumner 1990a: 28)—hidden youth. In order to “educate the recipient into the desired habits or way of life” (Sumner 1990a: 28), the dominant class “mobilizes forces of law, order, and moral purity against targeted sections of the population” (Sumner 1990a: 28). In the case of hidden youth in Hong Kong, the dominant parties involved in the assertion of social censure over the youth include the government (policy maker), media, social service institutions, education system and survelliants (i.e. police officers, social workers/counsellors, teachers and parents). They appear to form an alliance through which to safeguard the dominant discourses (Gramsci 1971) of promising youth and deviant youth, thus

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helping to “signify, denounce, and regulate” (Sumner 1990a: 27) the hidden youth, as well as other kinds of deviant youth. To further prevent the youth from being deviant, and even becoming hidden youth, this systematic management is effected at a very early stage—in this way, all youths become caught up in surveillance and in the making of normalising judgements to facilitate the indoctrination of rules, and the regulation and examination of the deviants (Foucault 1977a, b). It is noteworthy that the media plays a crucial role in the censuring process. From the textual analysis of news reporting by the media contained herein, it is evident that the discourses of the media align with those of the professionals and the government. This shows that the media generates “moral purity” (Sumner 1990a: 28) by acting as a spokesman; it duplicates the powerful discourses (Gramsci 1971) and serves the function of justifying social control (Rogers 1982). In order to make the discourses justifiable, they are transformed into “scientific categories” (Sumner 1990a: 298), by citing the professionals’ research findings and quoting the number of hidden youths to show the increasing severity of the problem, for example. The media even enlarges the censuring effect by incorporating dominant ideologies and its own personal adjectives during reporting, which act to both highly demonise the deviant youth/hidden youth and trigger a moral panic (Cohen 2002; Krinsky 2013), so as to enact social censure over the deviants. This publication, dissemination, and enunciation of the dominant discourses make the censuring of the youth a morally legitimate custom (Sumner 1990a). As the social censure gradually “takes on a more generalized character” (Sumner 1990a: 27), it becomes increasingly difficult to overthrow through scientific enquiry (Thompson 1975). The social workers demonstrate a paradoxical way of thinking about hidden youth by not being able to challenge the contradictions inherent in the prevalent dominant discourses. During the whole censuring process, moral discourses are used to disguise the political interests of the dominant class in terms of their censuring of the youth/hidden youth and to justify social censure as a moral-political activity (Sumner 1990a). Also, the involvement of various institutions and surveillants to provide a censuring mechanism shows that social censures are more than

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labels and denunciations; rather, they “combine with forms of power and economy to provide distinct and important features of practices of domination and social regulation” (Sumner 1990a: 37). In managing the transition of the youth to promising youth, the surveillants play an important role in signifying and denouncing those who are deviant, regulating all youths to ensure they behave in a socially desirable manner and preventing their deviance by the widespread indoctrination of rules and norms (Sumner 1990a). The censuring enacted by the surveillants is manifested in their daily interactions with the youth. However, the relationships that exist between the surveillants and the youth are unequal (Foucault 1980b), which allows the exertion of the power of the dominant surveillants over the powerless, subordinating youth (Foucault 1980b). They are two-sided, conflicting and opposing groups (Sumner 1990a). In order to safeguard the interests of the dominant class and strive for hegemony, the surveillants continuously supervise the youth, examine their deviant behaviour, and punish and discipline them, hoping to turn them into “docile bodies” (Foucault 1975: 138) who have internalised the dominant norms and are selfmotivated to regulate themselves to become “good” “promising youth” (Foucault 1977a, b). However, as power and resistance coexist (Foucault 1980b), the youths respond in ways that enable them to cope with these censuring acts (e.g. skepticism of the surveillants’ discipline and engaging in various deviant behaviours by way of protest). For fear that the social censure will be overthrown and the resistance of the youth will threaten their hegemony, the dominant class engages in continuous attempts to negotiate with the youth and re-educate them to the dominant norms, in an effort to repress them (Sumner 1990a). This, in turn, triggers further resistance from the youth (e.g. refusing school as a form of protest). As such, there are constant interactions between the surveillants’ power and the youth’s resistance, and the two parties thus find themselves embroiled in endless cycles of combat. Consistent with the labelling theory, repeated deviance leads to a negative societal response towards the deviance and brings about a stigmatising effect (Rubington and Weinberg 2003). This explains why the level of social censure increases as the deviant youth progress to seclusion and even to the

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prolonged hidden situation. At the same time, it is this severe and punitive stigmatisation of the youth’s deviance that completely marginalises the youths and undermines their opportunities to re-integrate into mainstream society (Rubington and Weinberg 2003). Hence, the youth is left with identifying with the deviant role (Lemert 1951) and gradually progressing to a prolonged hidden situation as an ultimate means of social adaptation. Although the youth has lived under high levels of censuring due to the influence of the surveillants’ negative judgements and evaluations of them (Bala 1998) throughout the whole developmental process, once they progress to a prolonged hidden situation, the intensity of the censuring effect reduces. This is because these youths have retreated from the disempowering mainstream society that imposes on them the heavy expectations of promising youth and requires them to follow the mainstream path; as such, they choose to remain in the hidden space, which is empowering. This change in environment grants the hidden youth the autonomy to claim a “legitimate and strategic position” (Wong 2003: 41) from which to self-actualise their own preferred interests and potentials and win the support of others. Being able to form their own subcultures and pursue online subcultural engagement during the hidden situation (Chan and Lo 2014a), the hidden youths have their negative identities received from the mainstream society replaced and overwritten by the positive identities received from their subcultural peers. Being “hidden” is their preferred lifestyle and it should not be regarded as a problem that undermines their quality of life (Chan and Lo 2014b). As such, they can release their subjectivity and regain the power to resist social censure; the social censure is thereby “overthrown or falls into disuse” (Sumner 1990a: 28). Due to the empowerment effect brought about by the internet and the subcultures, the youth are encouraged to stay in the hidden situation as an ultimate means of coping with social censure, instead of re-integrating into the mainstream society and fulfilling the socially desired roles. Armed with the knowledge that “hidden youth” is not necessarily a deviant concept and that these youths have an alternative, more positive, image that is underreported by the media reflect the fact that one should also be critical of the prevalence and legitimacy of knowledge,

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and look into all phenomena from multiple perspectives. This attitude is particularly important for practitioners working in hidden youth services (Chan and Lo 2014c). Instead of solely working towards reengaging these youths into the mainstream society, the practitioners should constantly reflect upon the truthfulness of the knowledge and dominant discourses being indoctrinated, and actively prevent any subjugation of the youth’s discourses and expressions. Practitioners should adhere to an empowerment approach by respecting the unique viewpoints of the youth and ensure any intervention is inclusive of their perspectives.

Note 1. Densha Otoko (Train Man), a Japanese television series originating from a book published in 2004, describes the purportedly true story of a 23-year-old otaku (Japanese geek) who wishes to lead a normal life but is too shy to find a girlfriend or even speak openly. Instead of participating in social situations, he stays online (Tsutsui 2008).

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Authors’ Biography Gloria Hongyee Chan obtained her Ph.D. from City University of Hong Kong in 2013 and is now working as an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the Caritas Higher Institute of Education, Hong Kong. She has published actively since her graduation and her papers appear in such SSCI journals as Deviant Behavior, Journal of Family Issues, Revista de Cercetare si Interventie Sociala, Applied Research in Quality of Life, and Children and Youth Services Review. Her new book on hidden youth was published by Routledge in 2017. Wing Lo is Professor of criminology in the Department of Applied Social Sciences, City University of Hong Kong. He graduated with a Ph.D. from the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in 1991, where he researched social censure and corruption in Hong Kong and China. He is a renowned triad society scholar and has been frequently invited to give keynote speeches at conferences. He was invited to visit New York in 2010 to address the United Nations delegates attending the Palermo Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime held once in every 10 years. In 2015, he was invited to address FAOs of the US Department of Defence on transnational organized crime in Asia. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of the British Journal of Criminology, and an editorial board member of Youth Justice, Asian Journal of Criminology and British Journal of Community Justice.

Sex Work, Censure and Transgression Maggie O’Neill

‘The legal regulation of sexual conduct is a battleground.’ Gayle Rubin (2011)

In The Sociology of Deviance: an Obituary (1994:vii) Colin Sumner set out to “portray a history of one of the most developed forms of critical, formal, thought on the subject of moral censure, namely the sociology of deviance” critiquing the sociology of deviance and by introducing a new theoretical field called the sociology of censure. The text builds upon Sumner’s argument that the maintenance of rules and norms are the outcome of censures and argues that: social censures are cultural formations tied to social control, censures are objects of study, not tools of enquiry for social research and that using censure is valuable in cultural and political analysis and in seeking to “distinguish social attributions

M. O’Neill (*)  University of York, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_7

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from ontological realties”. Sumner further argues that “since the norm of censure signified the deviance, it made more sense to begin looking at deviance as inherent within the signifying elements of the censure” (p. 309). This chapter seeks to work with the concept of social censure in relation to female sex work in contemporary society, by applying a social censure approach, alongside understandings of deviance and transgression already embedded in my research and publications on sex work and society—especially the signifying elements of the censure. In challenging and resisting social censures that signify deviance, that are ‘politically loaded’, I argue that it is most important to engage and conduct ethnographic, narrative, visual and participatory research with sex workers. This is a central focus of my work and relationship with the concept of censure, undertaking ideology critique/critical analysis and developing a sociology of transgression (O’Neill and Seal 2012). As a researcher, I value very much, C. Wright Mills focus on the importance of a sociological imagination as connecting individual experience ‘private troubles’ with societal relationships ad structures—taking in the relationship between history, biography and social structure. The brilliant feminist Gayle Rubin (2011:145) in Sexual Deviations tells us that the legal regulation of sexual conduct is a battleground and that “a radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression”. This is absolutely the case with an analysis of sex work, and especially from Victorian times to the current day. I suggest that the narratives, stories and experiences of sex workers are absolutely vital to any analysis of the social censure of sex work and that participatory research (O’Neill 2001, 2010; O’Neill and Campbell 2001) or participant-driven research (Bowen and O’Doherty 2014) are the ideal methods. The common definition of prostitution is the exchange of sexual services for money. The selling of sex is associated in the public imagination and embedded in law as moral deviance. Before embarking on this analysis, I want to highlight the Importance of the sociological and criminological imagination in Colin Sumner’s work as well as all in critical criminology. Critical [and for me cultural criminology1] is underpinned by ideology critique. By ideology,

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and following Marx and Engels (1845, 1987), I mean that which serves to conceal unequal and oppressive relations and practices; the way sectional interests are presented as universal; the denial of contradictions; and the naturalization of that which is socially constructed. Ideology critique is central to Adorno’s (1984) analysis of ‘identity thinking’ that describes the process whereby unlike things appear as like or as equivalent, such as the perceived equivalence of the label ‘prostitute’ with dirt, disease, immorality and a victim identify/role. Prostitutes are as inevitable in a metropolis as sewers, cesspits and rubbish tips; the civil authority should treat the one as it does the other—its duty is to supervise them, to reduce the dangers inherent in them as far as possible, and to this end to hide them and relegate them to the darkest corners; in short, render their presence as inconspicuous as possible (Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet from Prostitution in the City of Paris, 1836 cited in John 1994: 44–48).

Sex Work: History, Stigma, Censure Looking back on the history of sex work is to look back at the history of the social censure of sex work and sex workers. The sex worker is indexical, what she (until the 2003 when the Sex offences Act was made gender neutral) does becomes who she is (bad girl, pariah, sinner) and how she is defined. For Sumner “social censure is a category expressing cultural disapproval, or a sign of blame” and “reflects the dominant or key relationships or structures of the society” p. 265. Sumner writes that Foucault comments upon the creation, through social censure, of the concept of the homosexual. Such concepts are not fixed; they change over time, as we can see especially in the policing of sex and sexuality (Johnson 2012; Rubin 2011). Social censures reinforce dominant ideologies (heteronormativity), identity thinking and operate as tools of social control. For Sumner, dominant social censures are reflected in the criminal law. Social Censures are cultural, ideological formations that “are interconnected by their associated historic employment in ideological practices” implicated “at a deep structural level by the master censure of

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femininity” (1990:26). Hegemonic power is ‘consolidated’ through the process of normalisation (drawing upon Foucault) “into the arteries of social practice”. “Normalizing power works through the norm, which is a mixture of legality and nature, prescription and constitution to produce a ‘physics of a relational and multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the King, but in the bodies that can be individualised by these relations’” (p. 28). It is in this way, that social censures, for Sumner mark off the deviant from the good. The ideological censure of “women, femininity and subversive masculinities” is for Sumner an important issue for critical criminology to take up. It is in this way that the prostitute, I prefer the term ‘sex worker’, is indexical, she is the end stop in what it is to be a ‘good’ women. We can chart this process of social censure in the regulatory regimes and the making of a morally censured and gendered group.

Her Story Historical and fictive texts on the subject of prostitution highlight the social censures relating to sex work—the self-sustaining discourses and images that represent the ‘prostitute’/sex worker in contemporary times (O’Neill 2001, 2010; Self 2004), are inextricably connected to history of the Othering, stigmatisation and criminalisation of sex workers. Until the 2003, Sex Offences act in the UK prostitution offences could only be carried out by a woman. As the law stands in 2016 it is not illegal to sell sex, but it is very difficult to do so legally.

Current Law Persistent soliciting or loitering in a street or public place for the purposes of offering services as a prostitute (Policing and Crime Act 2009: s16); Soliciting another person in a street or public place for the purpose of obtaining sexual services (Sexual Offences Act 2003: s51a) [Known as kerb crawling legislation].

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Keeping, managing, acting or assisting in the management of a brothel (Section 33A Sexual Offences Act 2003). Causing, Inciting and Controlling Prostitution for Gain (Sections 52 and 53 Sexual Offences Act 2003). Paying for sexual services, where a person has been coerced/forced/ deceived into providing sexual services (Sexual Offences Act 2003: s53A; Policing and Crime Act 2009: s14). Other relevant legislation includes: • Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation (Sexual Offences Act 2003: s57–59) • The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (Sexual Offences Act 2003: s47–s50) • Placing of adverts relating to prostitution in telephone boxes (Section 46(1) Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001: s46 (1) As outlined in previous texts (O’Neill 2001, 2010; O’Neill and Seal 2012; Sanders et al. 2012) the history of sex work is framed by attempts to repress and make morally reprehensible the (predominantly) women who sell sex whilst at the same time aestheticizing the desires and fantasies symbolically associated with the sale of sex and concepts of the whore, the prostitute, the ‘fallen woman’ (Corbin 1990). The history of prostitution is also tied to the history and social organisation of sexuality and the social organisation of desire; gender relations; masculinity and capitalist exchange relations. Selling sex is out with Rubin’s (2011:152) charmed circle (sexual identity as operating within the limits of the normative/heteronormative) and is morally and socially censured. Research on prostitution and the law points to the fact that the law relating to prostitution in the UK is made up of ‘piecemeal legislation’ which criminalise a “variety of objectionable conduct” (Ding wall 1997:437). The history of the law relating to sex work supports a discourse of sex work as morally deviant and socially censured, revolving around three major periods in history.

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Victorian Morality Research on the Victoria era highlights the targeting of women who sell sex as an outcast group, as ‘prostitutes’ largely through the operation of the contagious diseases acts. Here we find, especially in Judith Walkowitz’s work (Walkowitz 1977), evidence and analysis of the regulation of working class communities, public space and moral order, through the policing and regulation of ‘poor’ women’s bodies. The 1824 Vagrancy Act introduced into statutory law the term ‘common prostitute’. The 1839 Metropolitan Police Act made loitering an offence in London, and was extended to towns/cities outside of London in the 1847 Town Police Clauses Act. The Contagious Diseases Acts of 1846, 1866 and 1869, introduced the compulsory medical examination of common prostitutes in 11 naval ports and garrison towns (1846); extended police powers and introduced (following the French system) registration and fortnightly inspection (1866); and, in 1869, extended the number of towns where the Act was in force. This legislature enshrined in law the category ‘prostitute’—what she does (sells sex) becomes who she is (her identity). This is a good example of ‘identity thinking’. Her identity is fixed as ‘prostitute’ through registration, cautioning, imprisonment in pseudo-prisons and lock hospitals. She is also made an ‘outcast’, censured, from the working-class communities she lived and worked in, set apart as ‘Other’, labelled a ‘common prostitute’. Poor women sold sex in Victorian England to survive, and many sold sex in addition to their ‘day’ jobs, for which they earned a pittance. The economic basis for entry into sex work is thus based upon deeply embedded social inequalities, social class, patriarchy, as well as, the organisation of sexual and labour relations. Walkowitz (1977, p. 77) states: For most ‘public’ women prostitution represented only a temporary stage in their life that they would pass through. The age concentration of registered women in their early 20s strongly supports the likelihood that they had prior work experience outside the home as well as

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having engaged in non-commercial sexual activity. In addition registered women appear to have stayed in prostitution for 2 or 3 years, leaving in their mid-twenties at a critical point in their lives—when most working-class women were settling into some domestic situation with a man, whether it be formal law or common-law marriage. The timing here is very important. For as long as prostitution represented a temporary stage in a woman’s career, and as long as she could leave it at her discretion, she was not irrevocable scarred or limited in her future choices. However, Walkowitz (1977, p. 72) explains how the registration of women as common prostitutes facilitated ‘official intervention into their lives’ and offered the police. An easy opportunity for general surveillance of the poor neighbourhoods in which they resided…Their temporary move into prostitution reflected the fluid social identity among the casual labouring poor who so violated Victorian society’s sense of order and place. The Contagious Diseases Acts in England prevented women’s access to public spaces where they might sell or exchange sex for money. The identity of the prostitute was naturalised and reified around the notion of the deviant, immoral, individual woman transgressing moral order, patriarchal order, and the law, for which she was heavily censured. The problem of prostitution was then dealt with by regulating the women involved through a combination of legal and medical discourses that regulated and controlled women’s sexuality and bodies, with particular regard to the sexual health of their bodies, and women’s access to public spaces. Women deemed prostitutes would be taken to pseudo-medical prisons (so-called lock hospitals) tested for sexually transmitted diseases, many women died as a consequence of mercury poisoning. In Prostitution and Feminism (2001), I discussed Alain Corbin’s (1990) analysis of commercial sex in nineteenth-century France. Corbin describes how the inter-related discourses of municipal authorities, hygienists, the police and judiciary combined to organise the regulation of prostitution around three major issues. The need to protect public morality; the need to protect male prosperity; and finally the need to protect the nation’s health. The prostitute was perceived as an active agent for the transmission of disease.

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For Corbin, these three major issues are rooted in five key images of the prostitute. The prostitute as the putain ‘whose body smells bad’ (p. 210). The prostitute as the safety valve which “enables the social body to excrete the excess of seminal fluid that causes her stench and rots her” (p. 211). The prostitute as decaying and symbolically associated with the corpse, with death. The prostitute as diseased symbolically associated with syphilis. Finally, the prostitute as submissive female body “bound to the instinctive physical needs of upper class males” (p. 213). For Corbin, these five key images reinforce the ambiguous status of the female body, the lower class, submissive body of the prostitute “at once menace and remedy, agent of putrification and drain … at the beck and call of the bourgeois body” (p. 212–213). Corbin goes on to illustrate how these discourses led to a series of principles which structured the regulation of prostitution. The principle of tolerance. The principle of containment. The principle of surveillance. Contain and conceal, but keep under continual surveillance. “The first task of regulation is to bring the prostitute out of the foul darkness and remove her from the clandestine swarming of vice, in order to drive her back into an enclosed space, under the purifying light of power” (p. 215). With the rise of utilitarianism the image of the brothel as a ‘a seminal drain’ (p. 215) closely supervised by the police, develops out of the image of the brothel symbolic of debauchery, perversion, disease and decay. In the UK, Suffragettes, most notably, Josephine Butler, a member of the social purity movement, campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Acts and they were eventually repealed. Josephine Butler objected to the double standards involved in the language and operation of the law which stigmatised, criminalised and punished women, but not their clients. Throughout recorded history, we find examples of the social censure of women selling sex. Victorian Lock Hospitals (Walkowitz 1980); the regulation of medieval brothels (Mazzo-Karras 1989); dress codes which distinguished prostitutes from ‘respectable women’ (Roberts 1992; Tseëlon 1995); the militarisation of the regulation

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of women and women’s bodies around the US air bases in the Philippines and Korea; the regulation of women in zones of toleration in Germany and the Netherlands; the informal regulation of saunas/ parlours by the police in England; the formal and informal regulation of adult entertainment venues; the suggestion by academics and policy makers for ‘zones of tolerance’. Universality develops as a consequence of patriarchal discourse and topography which is about regulating the bodies of women and socially and morally censuring, containing and separating ‘those’ women from ‘good’ women, normative women. The dominant mode of regulation from the Victorian period onwards is rooted in discourses of containment and surveillance as well as a degree of tolerance.

The Wolfendon Committee The next period of significant law reform was 1950s, with the deliberations of the Wolfendon Committee and the subsequent Street Offences Act of 1959. Chaired by John Wolfenden, the Committee was set up by to examine homosexuality and prostitution, after the war, by Maxwell Fyfe, the secretary of state for the Home Office. Fyfe was ‘concerned that London streets gave a deplorable impression of British immorality to foreign visitors’. The Wolfenden committee decided that the law was concerned only with ‘the manner in which the activities of prostitutes and those associated with them offend against public order and decency, expose the ordinary citizen to what is offensive and injurious, or involve the exploitation of others’. The law was concerned only with offences against ‘public order and decency’ not with private morality, private, consensual relations that were ‘outside the proper purview of the criminal law’ (Wolfenden 1957). So, here we have a liberal approach by the Wolfendon committee and the government, the law will not intervene in private consensual relations but it will intervene, regulate and police, public spaces and ‘public order’. As Roger Matthews’s states:

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It also rationalised resources directed towards the control of prostitution while increasing the certainty of convictions; and … it encouraged a more systematic policing of the public sphere in order to remove visible manifestations … in London and other urban centres.

2000’s to the Current Day The third major period for legislative activity is the contemporary period and as Brooks-Gordon states, is ‘set against a contemporary climate in which most sexual activity has been commodified’ and is marked by increasing criminalization, not only of sex workers but also their clients. There is a clear shift from enforcement to welfarism in the policing and regulation of sex workers within the broader context of neo-liberalism and a shift from ‘coordination through hierarchy or competition towards network-based forms of coordination’ (O’Neill 2010). These three periods of regulation and law reform instantiate in law, discourses, and representation of the abject status of the sex worker, who is defined as a morally deviant Other who may also be a victim, of her own making or of another: a man, brothel owner, or trafficker. What consistently remains hidden in all of these periods of regulatory reform is ‘identity thinking’ operating as moral and social censure, the poverty experienced by women and their families, the growing market and availability for sex work at a local and global level, the absence of labour rights, and the fact that social justice for sex workers is hence circumscribed (Pitcher 2015; Pitcher and Wijers 2014). Despite the gender neutrality of the law, male sex work is still much hidden, there is less research and scholarship and in the public imagination sex work is still very much a female occupation or transgression, which needs, from certain commentators social censure to regulate, protect and prevent others accessing it as a labour option. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 made the law gender neutral, addressed the gap in the law which enabled a 14–16 year old girl to the prosecuted for prostitution offences whilst not being able to legally consent to sex. The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2007, and the

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Police and Crime Act 2009 serve increasingly to regulate the sellers and purchasers of sex using abolitionist discourses, yet also claim concern for women’s welfare. Taken together, the dominant regulatory form in the UK is ‘abolition’ marked by stigma and censure. The law is very clearly gendered and as far back as the campaigns by Josephine Butler, Butler and her supporters objected to the double standards involved in the language and operation of the law which stigmatised, criminalised and punished women but not their clients. Moreover, there is also an obvious disadvantage for women who carry the stigma of ‘common prostitute’ when they appear in court. Discriminatory language helps to produce and maintain what has been described by various researchers (Pheterson 1989, 1990) as ‘whore stigma’ and has a long term, negative effect on equal opportunities for any woman named on record as a ‘common prostitute’.

Criminalisation and Policing Sex Work What research has evidenced most clearly is that criminalisation undermines safety, heightens vulnerability to targeted violence and acts as a barrier to reporting (O’Neill 2001; Sanders 2005, 2006; BrookesGordon 2006; Scoular and O’Neill 2007; Kinnell 2008; Boff 2012). John Lowman (2000) mapped what he called the discourse and contours of disposal: • • • •

legal structures promote victimisation prostitution takes place in illicit markets there is convergence with other illegal markets together this alienates sex workers from protective sources/forces

The sale of sex is associated in law and the public imagination with moral deviance. Regulation takes place through enforcement of laws and in the process a particular ideology is reproduced and sex workers are excluded from social justice. Exclusionary discourses of victimhood,

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rehabilitation, rooted in deviancy and a social censure model of regulating sex work—structured by capitalism, commodification, sexuality and sexual relations is instrumental in the surveillance, containment and ‘toleration’ of sex work and sex workers. Policing sex work has shifted from an enforcement operation to welfare-based policing and great gains have been made in addressing the endemic violence against sex workers. In Merseyside, what is known as the ‘Merseyside model ‘polices violence against sex workers as Hate Crime (Campbell 2014) is a step forward in dealing with violence against sex workers. This approach has been informed by the large numbers of homicides against sex workers. An estimated 152 sex workers were murdered between 1990 and 2015. Many researchers, practitioners, projects supporting sex workers agree that sex workers are often victims of crime, but rarely reported these incidents to the police. Indeed, in their report to the Home Affaires Select Committee in 2015, the National Ugly Mugs scheme sated that, almost 2000 reports have been made to NUM since July 2012, but only 25% of the victims were willing to formally report to the police. They also acknowledge the considerable variation in responses by police forces across the country to sex work and sex working. Referring to violence and abuse, barriers to exit and the impact of criminalisation the NUM report states: It is wrong that sex workers, who are predominantly women, should be criminalised, and therefore stigmatised and penalised, in this way. The current law on brothel-keeping also means that some sex workers are often too afraid of prosecution to work together at the same premises and as a result often compromise their safety and put them at considerable risk by working alone. We therefore recommend that, at the earliest opportunity, the Home Office change existing legislation so that soliciting is no longer an offence and so that brothel-keeping provisions allow sex workers to share premises, without losing the ability to prosecute those who use brothels to control or exploit sex workers. There must be zero tolerance of the organised criminal exploitation of sex workers. The report goes on to say that The Home Office “should also legislate for the deletion of previous convictions and cautions for prostitution

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from the record of sex workers by amending the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act.” Demands for the de-criminalization2 of sex work is gaining ground in the UK—the English Collective of Prostitutes and Scot Pep in Scotland are joined by various researchers, the Sex Work Research Hub, that I co-chair with Teela Sanders and Rosie Campbell, well as leading trade unions and organisations such as the Mothers Union, Amnesty, the Lancet and National Ugly Mugs (UKNSWP). Indeed, in February 2016, the National Police Chiefs Council published new Guidance on Policing Sex Work, for Police Forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The guidance highlights the tragedy of sex worker murders, including in Ipswich and Bradford, and states alongside the murders are large numbers of violent attacks that fall short of homicide. The guidance offers “practical and meaningful advice” to Police Services and ‘Strategic Enforcement’ that seeks to build consensus between “sex workers, outreach and support networks, local communities and the Police” as well as “the public protection duty that police services have in relation to the safety of sex workers and practical ways to address crimes against sex workers”. It recommends that the term Vice’ is “not professional nor acceptable for modern day police forces” and sets out a strategy for policing sex work that is based upon developing relationships between the Police, local outreach and support networks and individual sex workers. The strategic aims include “police sex work liaison officers who can play a key role in building trust, encouraging reporting, liaise with victims and sex work projects, supporting investigations and advising other police staff” (2015:19). This falls short of supporting de-criminalisation. But nevertheless is a step forward as is the Merseyside model of treating violence against sex workers as hate crime. As Sumner states: ‘No particular behaviour or personality can be shown to be universally deviant or criminal…censures of crime and deviance are irredeemably suffused with ideology…[and] are highly acculturated terms of moral and political judgement’ (Sumner 1990: 22, 26).

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Sex Work in the North East: Social Censures As an example, to illustrate the work that social censures do, I want to share an example of recent research, a small study undertaken by myself, Alison Jobe and Kelly Stockdale, Cath and Hannah, in the North East in 2015–2016. The research aimed to provide an evidence base to inform service provision, knowledge, policy and practice. It was conducted using participatory action research. Alison Jobe and I trained sex workers in participatory action research methods and they undertook the research alongside project workers and university researchers. Together we formed the research team. Community co-researchers interviewed women selling sex about their experiences, needs and support, and the key issues affecting them. The aim was to produce research to help us to better understand the lives and needs of women and to provide an evidence base to develop services to support women. We also wanted to de-mythologise and challenge stereotypes and identity thinking relating to sex work and sex workers. The following section is a very brief summary of our findings related to the focus of social censure this chapter.

On Street The on street workers ranged in age from 28-to 44-years old, although the majority were aged between 30–35 years old. All of the participants were White British and half started to sell sex under the age of 18 with one aged only 13. Six participants started in their twenties and a further three were in their 30s; the oldest age to start working was 35. Most of the participants had been working for over a year when they took part in the research, with seven participants having worked for over ten years. Five participants used the phrase ‘on and off’ to indicate that their sex work was not continuous over this period of time. Seven participants had no qualifications and were interested in getting qualifications. Eight participants had one or more GCSEs or NVQs Level 1 and 2 in subjects such as hairdressing, catering, or

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counselling. One participant had a first year diploma. Only one participant had GCSEs, A Levels and a university degree. All but one of the 17 of the women had previously been homeless and spoke about the ‘horrible’ experience they had being homeless, and the impact it had on them. Thirteen of the women mentioned having children; for two women these were now grown up, and of those with younger children only one lived with her child. Some of the women had some contact with their children but many did not expand further on this during their interview. One participant had initially said she did not have children, but later in the interview spoke about having a child, but the child had tragically died. Ten participants described themselves as in a relationship. Domestic violence appeared to be a theme across current or previous relationships. This was not a direct question in the interview therefore the exact numbers are unknown. The women were influenced by peers, friends, and male partners into embarking on sex work. Drug addiction was also a common feature of routes in to selling sex. Most of the participants (all but one) had regular clients and preferred them because they were ‘safer’, ‘reliable’, and saved them going out on the streets. Violence was a common experience for most of the women who had experienced high levels of violence including rape, assault and robbery. The women described feeling judged by support services especially the Police and Social Services, but other services too, in a way that impacted upon them accessing support.

Off Street The nine women interviewed were aged from 22-to 44-years old at the time of interview and had started to work in escorting from age 18 to their late 30s. Most of the women had been working as an escort for the last 1–5 years; while one of the women had more than 20 year’s experience of working as an escort. Four of the women were White-British;

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two were dual heritage; one as White-Other and two did not disclose their ethnic origin. Seven of the women live in privately rented accommodation, two were living in council/local housing authority properties. Four women had experienced brief periods of homelessness when in their teens/early 20s. The nine women interviewed come from a range of educational backgrounds. Five of the women did not complete formal secondary school education to GCSE level, although one of these returned to complete her GCSEs and A’ Levels at a later date and three later attended college courses (including health and beauty; animal care; and counselling courses). Four of the women interviewed have completed university degrees; one at postgraduate level. Three women had been involved with children’s social services at some point in their lives; two in their own childhoods/as young people and one who had issues with child custody. Six of the women have children and spoke of the need to support their children as a motivating factor in working as an escort. Only one of the women interviewed currently has a partner. Routes in were due to economic need, to support their families, pay-off debt and gain economic independence. None of the nine women currently work from their own homes and all expressed a desire to keep their working lives and home life separate. They expressed feeling safer working for an agency, that escorting had afforded them a better quality of life, and most felt in control in their work and escorting had built their confidence and/or boosted their self-esteem. Clients (all ages and ethnicities) are described as looking for intimacy and conversation as often as they are seeking sexual encounters. All of the nine women describe being in control over condom use in sexual encounters with clients, although they do describe clients who will try to negotiate over the use of condoms. All women felt uncomfortable about questions asked by sexual health practitioners, often felt judged and made up stories about why they were presenting at a sexual health clinic to avoid disclosing that they were selling sex. Two of the women described more positive experience

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with sexual health practitioners. All wanted a non-judgemental sexual health service that they would feel comfortable accessing. Overall women reported low experiences of violence in their work as escorts. Five had not encountered violence and four described violent incidents including being aggressive, rough sex and feeling unsafe on ‘out calls’. None of the nine women interviewed have contacted the police in relation to a violent client and the majority stated they would not feel comfortable approaching the police for help if they needed it, out of embarrassment at being identified and questioned about their work. Many of the women highlight the importance of working through an agency as a strategy for feeling and staying safe from violence, but not all agencies offered a safe environment. For most women escorting is their main source of income and they described earning large amounts of money from escorting. Only four of the women responded to the question ‘do you have any other paid employment?’ two women had other jobs but did not want to disclose what their jobs were and the other two didn’t have any other employment. The women described having difficulties with money that are related to the stigma of sex work. These difficulties impacted upon what women do with their money and how they perceive their income. Issues highlighted by women included: difficulties in saving the money they earn from working as an escort as the money earned is cash in hand, is difficult to bank and it’s difficult to pay tax on the money earned. Some describe not being able to bank the money and so it does not get spent ‘correctly’ (it gets ‘wasted’) and that this would not be an issue without illegality, criminalisation and stigma. One woman described the precarious nature of sex work and the difficult choices women have to make to manage their earnings and the stigma associated with earning money from sex working. None of the women interviewed stated any problems with drug addiction. None of the women stated that they had any convictions which related to their sex work. Some of the women describe being happy to stay working as an escort others saw working as an escort as a temporary stage to save

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money to get onto the property ladder, return to education, set up a business or save money to provide for older age.

Social Censures, Lived Experience and Transgression Off Street: Many of the women describe keeping their work as an escort from their family and friends. Most of the women describe having few friends from within the sex industry and keeping their work a secret from their wider social networks/friendship groups. Caro, who is in her early 20s, describes not wanting to make friends with other sex workers/escorts for fear of being exposed as an escort. Similarly, Pam, age 22, says: “(I) keep myself to myself. Otherwise it causes complications and you don’t know who you can trust” Pam, age 22. It’s the oldest profession and I think it’s one the most honest profession but there’s the stigma attached to it because some people don’t know what it is or don’t understand what it is. Sam, age 35–40. “I went to a walk in (health centre) and as soon as I said I was a sex worker- I got passed from pillar to post. They made it so complicated. I got told you need counselling. I got told you need help- you’re not right”… It took 3 weeks for me just to get a full screening done because they would not drop it that I needed to go on these courses to clear my head and see what I was doing was wrong. And at first, when I went in I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong but after 2 weeks of someone telling you are doing something wrong you start to believe it. Jess, age 22. On Street: I ended up starting because I’d been put in a hostel and I had to quit my job so because I quit my job I couldn’t get any dole money. So the council told me to quit my job but the dole wouldn’t give me any money so there was a girl working in my building so I worked with her, started going out with her to get money for food and things because I didn’t know about the services or anything, like I didn’t know about you [sex work support service]. Kath, age 29. Since my benefits were sanctioned and police stopped me begging. Sally, age 35.

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Erin, age 32, felt they were judged by GP ‘most definite’ and the chemist ‘look at me like crap’. June, age 44, also described feeling judged by nurses at the hospital, describing on particular nurse who made her wait until last for her medication. Zoe, age 33, also felt judged: “Just always are, in general: hospitals, police, social services—anywhere they find out I’m on methadone probably. They treat you like scum, disgusting, horrible. Just horrible.” “Police just made me feel worthless.” Kath, age 29. “Police could be more supportive of working girls, they made me feel low and degraded. A bloke picked me up, would not pay me and tried to rape me. I got dumped in the middle of nowhere. The police would not help—they said ‘we’re not a taxi service’.” Sian, age 28.

Transgressing Social Censures In addressing the issues and problems they experienced round moral censure the on street sex workers overwhelmingly wanted non-judgemental services, across the board from policing to sexual health support. They wanted positive relationships with the police, more and better support on release from prison. The off street workers also wanted non-judgemental health services with tailored health services for escorts/sex workers, to feel safer in reporting violence, exploitative managers and agencies addressed and help to manage their working lives and their earnings within the law (Hubbard 20093). How might we move beyond these moral censures, engage in ideology critique and work together with sex workers to address the deviance that signifies moral and social censure, move beyond the partial citizenship that signifies the experiences of sex workers and demand social justice and full citizenship for sex workers? First, I suggest, drawing upon Sumner Reading Ideologies we need to engage the sociological and criminological imagination in our work as sociologists and criminologists. Second, we need to listen to sex workers, conduct participatory and narrative, biographical research that will

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then, third, enable us to connect individual experience ‘private troubles’ with societal relationships ad structures—taking in the relationship between history, biography and social structure, to develop and deliver evidenced base knowledge, that might support campaigns and advocacy with sex workers. Fourth, encourage and support visual, filmic and alternative representations of sex workers and sex work, prioritising participatory and participant driven work. Challenges to the representation of sex workers in art and film such as the work of Nick Mai (2012, 2013, 2016) and Camille Melissa ‘s Whoretography blog4 can disrupt dominant discourses. Nick is a sociologist, ethnographer and a filmmaker whose research and filmic work shares the experiences of migrant sex workers, his approach, “experimental ethno-fiction” “challenges the humanitarian representation of the encounter between migration and sex work in terms of trafficking, while focusing on the ambivalent dynamics of exploitation and agency that are implicated”. Camille Melissa whose web site and blog Whoretography deconstructs “the visual complexities of sex worker online imagery and photographic narratives”. The Whoretography project aims to present the viewer with a realistic perception of sex workers otherwise hidden by feminism, anti sex work rhetoric and modern western cultural attitudes towards women’s bodies and sex. Sex workers often defy the current narratives of victim or deviancy but this is not reflected in the current approach to sex worker representation in digital images. Current digital imagery used to sell commercial sex online reinforces whore-phobic attitudes and allows the stigma surrounding sex work to be reinforced. It’s anticipated that Whoretography will allow for a different type of self-representation and agency. The production of a working identity is fundamental to protecting sex workers. Maintaining secrecy in photographs is also maintaining the stigma status quo. In short—many aspects of photographic marketing are contributing to the stigma and objectification of sex workers. My own work (O’Neill et al. 2002; O’Neill and Giddens; O’Neill 2010), using the concept of ethno-mimesis [ethnographic and art forms] sought to connect ethnographic, biographical research with

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photography, performance art, dance through ideology critique in practice. Taken together these three examples help to shift the representations of sex workers and sex work from a focus upon the prostitute as body object, or the Trauerspeil (tragedy) of the ‘Prostitute Body’ to the sex worker as citizen. In previous work I have argued that renewed methodologies can explore the social organisation of desire and to represent the complexity of sex worker lives, this is so important in the context of the global sex industry as a deeply embedded global institution that is tied to social, cultural, economic, and political structures, processes, and practices and structured by capitalism, commodification, sexuality and sexual relations (O’Neill 2010, O’Neill and Jobe 2016). “As Hannah Arendt has emphasised, from the time of our birth we are immersed in “a web of narratives” of which we are both the author and the object” (Benhabib 1992:198). A key outcome of participatory action research is feminist praxis as purposeful knowledge, alongside arts based work, is that it that can be made available to a wider audience, thus helping to “neutralise negative alienation” (Fals Borda 1983:97) and foster processes of cultural citizenship and inclusion with and for sex workers. By cultural citizenship, following Jan Pakulski (1997) I mean: the right to presence and visibility not marginalisation; the right to dignifying representation rather than stigmatisation; the right to identity and maintenance of lifestyle rather than assimilation to the dominant culture. Indeed, the need for a radical democratic approach to prostitution reform in the UK to challenge, transgress and change the social and moral censure of sex work and sex workers. The legal regulation of sex is a battleground, but it is not fixed, challenges can be made to the self-sustaining discourses and images that serve to Other and alienate sex workers from full citizenship and that sustain a discourse of disposal; analysis of the operation of social censure is crucial to this project.

Notes 1. My own approach is informed by critical theory, western Marxism and feminism.

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2. The three dominant regulatory forms of managing sex work are (i) ‘abolition’, this is, what we currently have in England, Scotland and Wales (ii) ‘de-criminalisation‘ meaning all laws criminalising sex work and associated activities end, as is the case in New Zealand and (iii) neo- Abolition, used to describe the Nordic or Swedish model where it is not illegal to sell but to buy. So the purchase of sex is criminalised. 3. Teela sanders and Jane Scoular are leading an ESRC participatory research project with Rosie Campbell, Jane Pitcher and Stewart Cunningham, called Beyond the Gaze focusing specifically on off street and digital, on-line working. This has already made a huge contribution to knowledge and the database the project is working with is probably the largest so far in sex work research. For more information see: https:// www.beyond-the-gaze.com/. 4. See the web-site here at: http://www.whoretography.com/new-blog.

References Adorno, T. W. (1984). Aesthetic theory. London: Kegan Paul. Benhabib‚ S. (1992). Situating the Self: Gender‚ Community‚ and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. London: Routledge. Boff, A. (2012). Silence on violence improving the safety of women: The policing of off street sex work and sex trafficking in London, Greater London Assembly. http://glaconservatives.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/03/ Report-on-the-Safety-of-Sex-Workers-Silence-on-Violence.pdf. Bowen, R., & O’Doherty, T. (2014). Participant-Driven Action Research (PDAR) with sex workers in Vancouver. In C.R. Showden, & S. Majic (Eds.), Negotiating sex work: Unintended consequences of policy and activism (pp. 53–74). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brookes-Gordon, B. (2006). The price of sex: Prostitution, policy and society. Cullompton: Willan. Campbell, R. (2014). Not getting away with it: Linking sex work and hate crime in Merseyside. In N. Chakroborti & J. Garland (Eds.), Responding to hate crime: The case for connecting policy and research. Bristol: The Policy Press. Corbin, A. (1990). Women for hire: Prostitution and sexuality in France after 1850. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Fals Borda, O. (1983). Knowledge and people’s power: Lessons with peasants in Nicaragua. Mexico: New Horizons Press. Hubbard, P. (2009). Opposing striptopia: The embattled spaces of adult entertainment. Sexualities, 12, 721–745. John, N. (Ed.). (1994). Violetta and her sisters: The lady of the camellias responses to the myth. London: Faber and Faber. Johnson, P., & Dalton, D. (2012). Policing sex. London: Routledge. Kinnell, H. (2008). Violence and sex work in Britain. Cullompton: Willan. Lowman, J. (2000). Violence and the outlaw status of (street) prostitution in Canada. Violence Against Women, 6(9), 987–1011. Mai, N. (2012). The fractal queerness of non-heteronormative migrants working in the UK sex industry. Sexualities, 15(5–6), 570–585. Mai, N. (2013). Embodied cosmopolitanisms: The subjective mobility of migrants working in the global sex industry. Gender, Place and Culture, 20(1), 107–124. Mai, N. (2016). Assembling Samira: Understanding sexual humanitarianism through experimental filmmaking in anti Atlas Journal 1 Avril 20016. https://www.academia.edu/24387234/Assembling_Samira_understanding_ sexual_humanitarianism_through_experimental_filmmaking. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1987 [1845]). The German Ideology. London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1988 [1845/1932]). The German Ideology. London: Prometheus Books. Mazzo-Karras. (1989). The regulation of brothels in later medieval England. SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14(2), 399–433. Matthews, R., & O’Neill, M. (2003). Prostitution: A reader pp. 83–104. London: Ashgate Press. O’Neill, M. (2001). Prostitution and feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press. O’Neill, M. (2010). Cultural criminology and sex work: Resisting regulation through radical democracy and participatory action research (PAR). Journal of Law and Society, 37(1), 210–232. O’Neill, M., & Jobe, A. (2016). Adult sex work, law and policy: New horizons in the 21st century. In Discover Society. http://discoversociety. org/2016/12/06/policy-briefing-adult-sex-work-law-and-policy/. O’Neill‚ M., Giddens‚ S., Breatnach‚ P., Bagley, C., Bourne, D., & Judge, T. (2002). Renewed methodologies1 for social research: Ethno-mimesis as performative praxis. The Sociological Review‚ 50(1)‚ 69–88.

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O’Neill, M., & Seal, L. (2012). Transgressive imaginations. London: Palgrave. Pakulski, J. (1997). Cultural Citizenship. Citizenship Studies, 1, 73–86. Pheterson, G. (Ed.). (1989). A vindication of the rights of whores. Seattle: Seal Press. Pheterson, G. (1990). The category “prostitute” in scientific enquiry. The Journal of Sex Research, 27(3), 397–407. Pitcher, J. (2015). Sex work and modes of self-employment in the informal economy: Diverse business practices and constraints to effective working. Social Policy and Society, 14(1), 113–123. doi:10.1017/ S1474746414000426. Pitcher, J., & Wijers. (2014). The impact of different regulatory models on the labour conditions, safety and welfare of indoor-based sex workers. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 14(5), 549–564. Roberts, (1992). Whores in history: Prostitution in western society. London: Harper Collins. Rubin, G. Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In Deviations: A Gayle Rubin reader. Durham: Duke University Press. Rubin, G. (2011). Deviations. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Sanders, T. (2005). Sex work. A risky business. Cullompton: Willan. Sanders, T. (2006). Behind the personal ads: The indoor sex markets in Britain, p. 11. In R. Campbell & M. O’Neill (Eds.), Sex work now. Cullompton: Willan. Scoular, J., & O’Neill, M. (2007). Regulating prostitution: Social inclusion, responsibilization and the politics of politics of prostitution reform. British Journal of Criminology, 47(5), 764–778. Self, H. (2004). Prostitution, women and misuse of the law: The fallen daughters of eve. London: Frank Cass. Sumner, C. (1990). Foucault, gender and the censure of deviance. In L.  Gelsthorpe & A. Morris (Eds.), Feminist perspectives in criminology. Buckingham: Open University. Sumner, C. (1994). The sociology of deviance: An obituary. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. Reading ideologies: An Investigation into the Marxist Theory of Ideology & Law. London: Academic Press. Tseëlon, E. (1995). The masque of femininity. London: Sage. Walkowitz, J. (1977). The making of an outcast group:prostitutes and working women in nineteenth century Plymouth and Southampton. In M. Vicinus

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(Ed.), A widening Sphere: Changing roles of victorian women (pp. 72–93). Bloomington:Indiana University Press. Walkowitz, J. (1980). Prostitution and victorian society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolfenden. (1957). Report of the committee on homosexual offences and prostitution. London: HMSO.

Author Biography Maggie O’Neill  is Professor in Sociology and Criminology in the Department of Sociology at the University of York. A former chair of ESA research network 3 on European biographies and a founding member of the Regional Race Crime and Justice network in the North-east and the Regional Equality Forum‚ she is Co-Chair of the Sex Work Research Hub and Co-Chair of the University of York’s Migration Network.

Mitigating and Responding to Corporate Violence: Beyond Crime and Criminology Steve Tombs

Introduction My focus here is on one specific form of corporate harm—the violence corporate activity wreaks systematically upon workers—and one specific question—what are the most appropriate ways of responding to and mitigating such harm? The chapter sets out the scale of the harm at issue here, before arguing that this is in fact best seen as violence, albeit violence which is routinised, systematically, produced as a matter of fact by an amoral institution, the capitalist corporation. It then considers the monetary fine as the typical criminal justice response to such corporate violence, before discussing alternative sanctions. The chapter concludes argues that a break with criminal justice and legal practices and modes of reasoning is required, as the only solution to corporate violence is the abolition of the corporation.

S. Tombs (*)  Open University, Milton Keynes, England e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_8

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The dominant role that corporations play in our lives makes them appear to us as a fact of life. Politically, it has become received wisdom for most governments around the world—whatever their formal ideological or technocratic learning—that the corporation is the single best way of organising the production and distribution of goods and services in the contemporary world. The corporation is a motor of efficiency, innovation, economic progress, and ultimately social good. On this dominant view, corporations are essentially benevolent institutions. Of course, it is impossible to deny that corporations can, too, generate destructive side-effects. But if corporations appear to act irresponsibly, or even illegally, it is argued widely in political circles—sadly, with the support of those academics whose claims regarding regulation dominate to the point of constituting an ‘orthodoxy’ (Tombs 2015)—that corporations and their senior managers must be empowered to reform themselves along more socially responsible lines. Only where ‘corporate social responsibility’ fails should governments step in to regulate (or enforce) the law in order to bring recalcitrant corporations into compliance. The dominant, unifying, principle in contemporary mainstream politics and academia is that it is possible for corporations themselves to balance effectively economic progress with social welfare. In fact, none of these claims withstand scrutiny. The problematic consequences of corporate activity are not merely side effects, marginal aberrations to be remedied through self-regulation or even law enforcement. The problems caused by corporations—which seriously threaten our lives and the very existence of our planet (Sumner 2014)—are enduring and necessary elements of corporate activity. Corporations lie, cheat, steal, injure and poison as part of their everyday routine (Tombs and Whyte 2015). In this chapter, I focus on one specific form of corporate harm— the violence corporate activity wreaks systematically upon workers—and one specific question—what are the most appropriate ways of responding to and mitigating such harm? In so doing, the chapter sets out the scale of the harm at issue here, before arguing that this is in fact best seen as violence, albeit violence which is routinised, systematically, produced as a matter of fact by an amoral institution, the capitalist corporation. I then consider the monetary fine as the typical criminal justice response to such corporate violence, before discussing

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alternatives proposed within and around criminology and criminal justice systems. At this point, the chapter argues that a break with such practices and modes of reasoning is required, as the only solution to corporate violence is the abolition of the corporation. It will be clear to readers of this volume that the lines of argument developed here owe much to the intellectual trajectories established by Colin Sumner through his work on social censure, ideology and violence, and indeed to one specific, crucial insight: namely that we cannot take crime—and, I would argue, criminal justice (Tombs and Whyte 2017)—for granted. The criminal justice system remains preoccupied with a relatively limited number of interpersonal crimes. (Hillyard and Tombs 2004). And criminology by and large obediently falls into line behind this ‘official’ version of what constitutes the crime problem (Hillyard et al. 2004a). Neither, ultimately, has much use in considering or challenging production regimes which encompass the routine killings and injuries committed by corporations.

Corporate Harm, Crime and Violence Violence is a cultural and historical sign, subject to the usual filters of human interest, prejudice and principle; as a sign of disapproval, it is more arbitrary and capricious than a simple effect of its referent or target. … what counts as violence is subject to the acculturated or political understandings and standpoints of the viewer (Sumner 1996: 3). Each year, HSE press releases the numbers of ‘fatal injuries’ to workers as the trail to its annual statistical publication. Often referred to by HSE as fatal ‘accidents’, this headline figure of somewhere around 150 deaths omits vast swathes of fatal injuries as well as deaths from occupational exposures which it in fact records. HSE’s Health and Safety Statistics 2015–2016 also refers to 13,000 deaths “each year estimated to be linked to past exposures at work, primarily to chemicals or dusts” as well as 2515 mesothelioma deaths, “with a similar number of lung cancer deaths linked to past exposures to asbestos” (Health and Safety Executive 2016: 4). These data—far removed from HSE’s ‘headline’ figure—begins to explain how researchers from the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work calculated 21,000 deaths per year in the UK

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from work-related fatal diseases, though noted that such data ‘‘might still be an under-estimation’’ and that deaths from work-related diseases are ‘increasing’ (Hämäläinen et al. 2009: 127). Another UK study estimated that up to 40,000 annual deaths in Britain are caused by workrelated cancers alone (O’Neill et al. 2007). And long-term research by the Hazards Campaign,1 drawing on a range of studies of occupational and environmental cancers, the number of heart-disease deaths with a work-related cause, as well as estimates of other diseases to which work can be a contributory cause, produced a lower-end estimate of 50,000 deaths from work-related illness in the UK each year. This figure ranks highly in comparison with virtually all other recorded causes of premature death in the UK (see Tombs 2014). This level of physical harm, produced on an annual basis, does not even begin to incorporate the non-fatal injuries and illnesses caused by work each year—which even on recorded data run into the hundreds of thousands, and on the basis of HSE’s collection of self-reported data is counted in seven figures (see below). These data, for all their limitations, are enough to allow us to reach one indisputable conclusion: work is a major source of physical harm. It should further be noted that, albeit in the absence of criminalisation, the best available evidence points to the conclusion not just that the majority of this harm is preventable, but that the criminal law formally requires it to be prevented: HSE has estimated up to 75% of these deaths and injuries are the result of breaches of the criminal law (Pearce and Tombs 1998; Tombs and Whyte 2007). And if we can refer to much of this harm as crime, we can and should also characterise this harm and crime through the term violence. Certainly, if we consider these illegalities in terms of their consequences—injury and death—we realise that these look remarkably similar to the results of those events that most men and women, as well as policy-makers, politicians, and academics, generally deem to be ‘proper’ violence. Now, this is rarely recognised within criminology, which tends to follow the state’s lead in what it prioritises as ‘violence’. But, as I have argued elsewhere, the lack of criminological attention to ‘safety crimes’ as crimes of violence is less related to the phenomena at issue, more a failure of the discipline to reflect upon long-standing, but ontologically weak, assumptions.

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Most  crucially, dominant conceptions of violence are based upon an implicit association of violence with the interpersonal and with intention, both qualities that are often absent from safety crimes (Tombs 2007; Tombs and Whyte 2007). Following Galtung (1969) and Salmi (1993), the category of ‘indirect violence’ is particularly important in thinking about ‘safety crimes’, as it directs our attention to the “relations of domination, and the violences that are condoned as part of the ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ functioning of a society such as ours” (Catley 2003: 5), so that ‘violence’ is not a quality of an act but the meaning attributed to it, within specific cultural and historical contexts (Sumner 1996). Health and safety crimes result from the organisation of production and working regimes that carry deadly consequences for some workers and members of the public. They are generally not characterised by the interpersonal or mens rea. But one might argue that since there is no intention to kill any specific person here, these routine crimes of widespread negligence or recklessness have an indiscriminate quality, and are generally more calculated and more easily avoided than many interpersonal crimes of violence committed in the heat of the moment. For some, this makes them arguably a greater social—and crime—problem than interpersonal violence (Reiman 1998: 61–71). This is in many ways to recall a very old argument: When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call that deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call this deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or the bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them … to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual (Engels 1845/1969: 106). So wrote Friedrich Engels in his classic analysis of The Condition of the Working Class in England. He coined the phrase ‘social murder’ to

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describe the systematic and routine killing of workers and citizens in the horror of the emergence of industrial capitalism. As the data above indicates, if its scale and contours have changed, this ‘social murder’ is not merely a matter of historical record. Further, the harm generated is not simply physical—these physical harms are associated with a wider series of harms generated by each death, injury or illness. These include various emotional and psychological harms, many of which may be short lived, others of which may endure over long periods. These, in turn, have harmful consequences in terms of family, dependents, friends and so on, and again may incur costs upon the state. In effect, each form of physical harm is, albeit differentially, likely to be associated with ripples of harms. There are also significant financial costs entailed here, in the form of a loss of income or additional costs incurred by the injured person or the families of those bereaved. But there are also wider, economic costs, in the sense that all of these harms entail various layers of costs for the state, ultimately borne by taxpayers and thus impinging upon the state’s ability to provide other goods and services; such costs range from those associated with health care, welfare and sickness payments, lost income and production, legal and administrative costs, as well as regulatory resources, and so on. Where the harms are generated in profit-making settings, these costs are socialised, while profits remain privatised—so there are clear, harmful wealth-distribution effects, also. The Health and Safety Executive intermittently calculates the overall financial costs of injuries and ill health, its most recent such calculation being for the year 2014/2015. In that year, injuries and new cases of ill health cost society an estimated £14.1 billion (Health and Safety Executive 2016: 6). Further, it notes that ‘‘The majority of costs fall on individuals, while employers and government/taxpayers bear a similar proportion of the costs of workplace injury and ill health” (Health and Safety Executive n.d.). More specifically, the distribution of costs is estimated as follows: £8b is borne by individuals, £2.8b by employers and £3.3b by government/taxpayers; thus employers bear some 20% of the costs, the smallest absolute and relative figure (ibid.). This is quite typical. Corporations are generally not required to meet the costs of the most damaging effects of their activities. This is due to

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the system used in accounting practice that privileges some costs and benefits over others. In general, corporate balance sheets only reflect a limited or specified range of costs. The costs that typically are counted are the standard inputs of commercial or productive activity: the costs of raw materials, of processing these through energy and using technologies, the costs of building or renting and maintaining premises or the costs of labour power. However, industrial injuries and diseases, alongside other production related harms such as environmental pollution, involve major social costs that are not included: what economists call ‘externalities’. It is the mechanisms of standard accounting practice which reduce the value of death, injury and illness to mere externalities, peripheral side-effects of corporate activity. Quite simply, some costs of doing business are counted and other costs are not. It is this principle that enables corporations to act as ‘externalising machines’ (Bakan 2004: 60).

Corporate Decision-Making Current normality is criminal and thus crime stands compromised as a meaningful category (Sumner 1997: 149). How do these externalising machines work, and how do they produce violence? I have long argued that it is certainly the case that we can ascribe the aspiration for rationality to the corporation—which is not to argue that this aspiration is always achieved, so that no particular corporation can or does, in fact, act entirely rationally at all times. Internally, a corporation generates inward and outward facing legitimacy through its efforts to act as a rational entity: it has a formal structure, which includes formal divisions of labour, mechanisms of governance and lines of accountability within those mechanisms, and formal means of reporting; it has established mechanisms for distributing rewards, benefits and censures; it generates strategic plans and operates through a plethora of written documents, plans, procedures, policies and so on; it sets targets; it generates a mass of information. In all of these ways, one might argue, it continually seeks the future-oriented control of unpredictability and uncertainty (Box 1983) through

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mechanisms based upon formal, calculative rationality. A key mechanism for achieving these goals is the development, use and/or access to often highly sophisticated information-gathering systems with which to make informed operational and strategic decisions. Both companies and their directors are in a position to—indeed are required to—make decisions which, if not based upon perfect knowledge, are based upon a range of knowledge resources available to them which allow them to determine options in a calculative sense. Those resources include financial results and projections, market analyses, probability and risk calculations about future market conditions and so on. And, indeed, these resources are among the key characteristics used by, for example, ratings agencies, business analysts and journalists, and thus actual and potential investors to make judgements about corporations. That is, their health and viability is measured against indices of rationality. And in turn, any corporation seeks at the very least to present itself to external environments as rational. Now, there is no doubt both that if corporations do seek to act on the basis of rational decision-making, then at times they produce outcomes which are unintended, undesirable and, in these senses, irrational—the mass killings at Bhopal, for example were clearly not intended nor desirable outcomes for the corporations involved; ‘the corporate entity’ would have better avoided, and indeed suffered2 to some extent from not avoiding, these outcomes. But this does not represent ‘proof ’ that corporations had not struggled towards more rational decisions which would have pre-empted the deleterious outcome(s), merely that they failed in these efforts. Thus if corporations strive towards being, they do not always manage to act as, rational entities. Corporations are not always capable of engaging in accurate forms of calculation; somewhat differently, even where they engage in accurate forms of rational calculation, they may not be able to act successfully upon such calculation. More generally: corporations do not always act as unified rational entities; there exist tensions and conflicts within and between various levels of management, these conflicts both reflecting and generating tensions between organisational ‘goals’; decision-making tends to be characterised by bounded rationality, whereby ‘deadlines, limited participation and the number

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of problems under consideration’ lead to decisions based upon limited information; and managements fail to act strategically in a variety of business areas (Pearce and Tombs 1998). There is a wealth of empirical and conceptual evidence which attests to the fact that most corporations do not approximate this mode of rational calculation for most of the time. This is not to deny, then, that amongst corporations there exists “a diversity of styles of organisational life” (Fisse and Braithwaite 1993: 122), nor that these diverse styles have real effects for the production of violence. Yet despite diversity in terms of what actually happens within the hidden world of the corporate sanctum, the key point remains: whether corporations actually act rationally, or according to some ‘organisational politics’ or ‘political citizen’ rationale (Kreisberg 1976), or muddle their way through in decision-making terms via some ‘garbage-can’ model of decision-making (Cohen et al. 1972), they represent themselves as thoroughly rational entities. This representation—whether it is an aspiration or obfuscation—made by and for corporations is also central to claims as regards appropriate forms of regulation, specifically, regarding their capacities effectively to self-regulate (notwithstanding that this does not account for the motivation to do so; Tombs 2015). In other words, and to be clear: whether or not ‘the corporation’ engages in activities based upon decision-making processes which approximate rational calculation, it consistently strives to do so, and it consistently represents itself as capable of doing so. These are integral aspects of corporate existence. A further effect of this mode of operation and/or representation is also that corporations, as rational, calculating entities, are neither moral nor immoral ‘actors’—even if the effects of their activities can appear as if possessing, variously, one or other of these characteristics. It, therefore, follows that characterisations of the corporation which claim that it has, by example, or can, inherently, act on some moral basis confuse contingent outcomes with the necessary form and function of the corporate entity. Thus, it is worth recalling the argument of Box (1983), to the effect that the nature of the capitalist mode of production forces corporations to attempt to exert as much control as possible over their operating environments, which pushes them into violating those regulations that seek to prevent individual corporations from using their

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corporate power to exert certain forms of control over consumers, workers, governments, other corporations, and so on (ibid.). Sutherland expressed this pithily when he referred to corporations as ‘rationalistic, amoral and non-sentimental’ (Sutherland 1983: 236–238).

Responding to the Harmful Corporation As a whole, censures and their enforcement tend to reflect the antisocial interests of capital, patriarchies and ethnicities. In that way, the major ‘crimes’ often remain uncensured and unpunished (Sumner 2004: 28). How, then, does the state respond to the grotesque scale of impersonal, routine harm as outlined above? Formally, the state’s approach is to seek to regulate the corporation with respect to health and safety law—and to be clear, this is regulation not policing. The term ‘regulated’ immediately indicates that those are crimes somewhat different in character from the real stuff of criminal justice: thus, corporate crimes are normally dealt with by different types of enforcement authorities (‘regulatory agencies’) and often with different types of (‘administrative’ or ‘regulatory’) law. But these are more than technical distinctions, of course. There now exists a mass of studies—mostly nationally based, though with some useful cross-national comparative studies also—regarding the practices of a whole range of regulatory bodies (see Clarke 2000: 136–161). Several broad generalisations can thus be made about the practices and effects of regulatory enforcement agencies: non-enforcement is the most frequently found characteristic; enforcement activity tends to focus upon the smallest and weakest individuals and organisations; prosecutions for corporate crime are relatively rare (compared with ‘conventional crime’); and, as we shall see, sanctions following regulatory activity are light (Snider 1993: 120–124). The now-hegemonic body of academic work around regulatory enforcement describes and prescribes a compliance-oriented enforcement approach for regulatory bodies vis-à-vis the business sector (Tombs 2015). On the basis of such an approach, the aim of regulators is not to seek to punish past evils but to prevent future harm via

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ensuring compliance with law—and in so doing, enforcement best proceeds through persuasion, where regulators advise, educate, and bargain, negotiate and reach compromise with the regulated. As a result, business offences typically remain outside the ambit of mainstream criminal legal procedure. Yet even if specific offences are subject to the formal processes of criminal law, they are treated differently to ‘conventional crimes’ at each stage of the criminal justice process via what we might call a ‘regulatory tolerance’ (Tombs and Whyte 2014) including, as we shall see, in the sanctions that follow conviction. Thus: even where corporate crime is technically processed as crime it remains not really like a real crime. To illustrate the significance of these processes—effectively, processes of non- or de-criminalisation—let us turn to recorded injury and illness data, extending our analysis beyond the subset of occupational fatalities. According to HSE’s most recent data, they state that, in 2015/2016, there were an estimated 2.3 million people suffering from an illness (long-standing as well as new cases) they believed was caused or made worse by their current or past work, as well as some 621,000 non-fatal injuries which occurred at work (Health and Safety Executive 2016: 3–5). Yet the companies which cause these deaths, injuries and illnesses are subjected to virtually no regulatory oversight. If we put the numbers of inspections by the Health and Safety Executive in the context of the numbers of workplaces for which they are responsible, we find that the ‘average’ workplace can now expect an inspection about once every 50 years, while the number of inspections is in long term decline (Tombs 2016: 155). Moreover, it is not simply that inspections are low, and declining; so too are investigations. Only a very limited subset of the deaths recorded by HSE—the 150 or so which constitute HSE’s headline figure—are subject to investigation, while less than 1 in 20 major injuries is subject to investigative scrutiny. On the basis of such state inactivity, then, it is unsurprising that prosecutions are few and far between. Thus, in 2015/2016, there were 660 health and safety convictions across Great Britain, the average penalty being just under £58,000.3 In short, the chances of a death, injury or illness resulting in a successful prosecution are infinitesimal, while the sentence attached to

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any such conviction is, on any criterion, low, somewhat giving weight to a long-standing trades-unionist adage: if you want to kill somebody and get away with it, first set up a company and then employ them. Somewhat differently, in the case of a limited subset of deaths, companies may now be charged with corporate manslaughter, on the basis of a new law introduced in 2007, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act (CMCH Act), designed to facilitate the prosecution of large, complex organisations for occupational death(s). By the end of 2016, with the law in force for almost 8 years, there had been just 20 convictions under the new Act. Further, only four had attracted a sentence which reached the putative minimum figure of £500,000, albeit that in the case of one of these, the company, Sterecycle [Rotherham] Ltd. was fined £500,000 despite the fact that, by the time the trial had begun, it was in administration, while in the case of another, Monavon Construction Ltd., the £500,000 amounted to £250,000 for each of two deaths. Sentencing guidelines for health and safety offences—under both CMCH Act and the Health and Safety at Work Act, 1974 (HSW Act)—have recently been subject to revision. From February 2016, organisations which are convicted of breaches under the HSW Act should be fined in the range £50–£10 million, while successful prosecutions under the CMCH Act should generate fines in the range £180,000–£20 million (Sentencing Council 2015: 3, 21). Given the limited use of either body of law, and the fact that levels of fines under the previous guidelines failed to reach minimal suggested levels, it is tempting to view these guidelines as pure symbolism. In fact, what we have here is a sphere of activity which produces significant harm but which is effectively non- or de-criminalised—in distinction to many much lower level incivilities which, many have convincingly argued, are increasingly subject to punitive (and counterproductive) levels of state responses. It is in such a context that some academic criminologists have raised a series of objections regarding the efficacy of the use of fines following the conviction of a corporation—and these apply specifically in the context of responding to health and safety offences, even though they are usually made more generally. It is worth rehearsing these briefly here.

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First, fines are not proportionate to the offence committed or the harms caused, that is, they are too low, a conclusion that seems to be demonstrated by above data about actual levels of fines in respect to health and safety crimes and harms. Second, however, even if fines were to be significantly increased, this still begs the question of whether heavy fines are an appropriate way to deal with corporate wrong? In relation to corporate crime it might be thought that the fine is a perfect disposal because, unlike individuals whose offending is often committed whilst the person is affected by alcohol or drugs, corporations strive, generally, to behave rationally. They conduct business through decision-making processes that are susceptible to rationally predictable outcomes like profits and fines. Businesses use cost–benefit analysis as a routine procedure. The problem is that such calculations are as much based on the likelihood of being caught as they are upon the level of fine if caught and convicted. Thus, senior management within companies may decide to take the risk of unsafe systems as there is a very low chance of being inspected or, indeed, if inspected and detected, of actually being prosecuted for the offence. Thus, the very factors which make the use of fines superficially attractive—that the corporation is a rational, calculative entity—also render them problematic. This is exacerbated by the fact that even high fines and the possibility of detection and their being imposed might be deemed as calculable, a rational risk to take as a cost of doing business— witness the classic Ford Pinto case, for example (Dowie 1987). Third, fines at whatever level do not aid rehabilitation—and, indeed, the higher they are set, they may actually hinder more effective systems of health and safety being developed in the aftermath of a conviction since they impose costs on the company. Fourth, however, such costs may not at all be borne by the offending company itself—many argue that the costs of fines tend to be counterproductive since they are dispersed to the ‘innocent’. Thus it has been argued that the burden of such fines is inappropriately borne by employees, through worsening working conditions, cuts to, or deferred increases in, wages, or even potential redundancy; or by consumers, through higher prices; or both. In other words, if the corporation is indeed an externalising machine, then it is difficult to see any rational response to large fines other than attempting to externalise these.

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Fifth, the very use of fines is partly an effect of the fact that the overwhelming object of prosecution is the corporation and not its directors or other senior managers. In this approach, the criminal justice system acts upon, but at the same time continually reproduces, what is known as the ‘corporate veil’, an effect of corporate personhood and limited liability. The combination in law of the principle of limited liability (limiting the liabilities of investors in a company to the sum invested) and the creation of the corporation as a legal subject (a legal person), recognised as having a single identity or ‘personhood’ that is separate and distinct from the human persons that make up the corporation (its owners, directors, managers, employees and so on), are the two key legal principles which constitute the corporate veil—and are the basis for the corporation as a structure of irresponsibility. The veil protects those who own, control and benefit from the corporate entity, as the corporate entity is the object of responsibility and accountability for ‘its’ actions or omissions. The idea of the anthropomorphic corporation—the metaphorical person-writ-large which thinks, decides, acts, innovates and so on—is one which holds considerable sway on the popular and legal consciousness. But in reality the corporation is not, and can neither think nor act as a person, while legal personhood is historically and contemporaneously deployed in ways which generally allow corporate entities to evade legal accountability. But it is the separation of the various human elements of the corporation that is crucial in permitting what the company actually does—what it produces, the services it provides, its investment activities and so on—to become abstracted from the human actions that occur within the corporation itself.

Disrupting the Corporation [W]hen social relations are not working normally (for example because of a conflict between the parties which results in non-cooperation), the way things appear is different and the normal veil of appearances can be seen for what it is, merely a socially contextualised appearance. In such

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times of crisis and conflict, social structures, individual characters and material objects are often seen for what they really are (in themselves). The normal practical interpenetration which gives their social appearance a natural character is shattered and both substance and social form become available to view (Sumner 1979: 225). I return to the issue of the corporate veil, and corporate personhood in particular, below. For now, it is worth noting that there is a range of other responses to corporate offending which have been proposed or enacted, if not in the UK and if not necessarily nor solely in the context of health and safety offences (See, for example Braithwaite and Geis 1982; Croall 2005; Etzioni 1993; Punch 1996; Slapper and Tombs 1999). That said, many of these have been considered in two recent UK consultations on sentencing corporate offenders—the Macrory Review (Macrory 2006) and an HSE consultation in 2012. The latter, for example sought views on restorative justice, conditional cautioning, enforceable undertakings, remedial orders, probation (for companies and directors) and adverse publicity orders.4 Both remedial and publicity orders are available as sanctions under the CMCH Act. Amongst these, arguments for corporate probation are particularly worth exploring. The starting point for this is that if rehabilitation has generally failed as a doctrine for the control of traditional crime, it can perhaps better succeed with corporate crime (Braithwaite and Geis 1982). That is, many corporate crimes, but one might argue health and safety crimes in particular, arise from defective control systems, insufficient checks and balances within the organisation, and poor communication systems (Braithwaite 1985). These failings are sometimes deliberate, and made by the corporation to reduce costs, and sometimes the failings are inadvertent. Either way, it is possible for legal orders to force corporations to correct criminogenic policies and practices. Thus: Rehabilitation is a more workable strategy with corporate crime than with traditional crime because criminogenic organisational structures are more malleable than are criminogenic human personalities. A new internal compliance group can be put in place much more readily than a new superego (Braithwaite and Geis 1982: 310; see also Etzioni 1993: 155).

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Moore argues that this alternative strategy of ‘rehabilitation’ could be achieved by putting the offending corporation on supervised probation with the stipulation that it must implement stated reforms (Moore 1987). Failure to comply could warrant other, more severe sanctions (such as incapacitation, below) to be applied. The object of internal reform, he concludes, is a preferable alternative to a deterrence strategy based on increased sanctions to control corporate wrongdoing through punitive means. This does not, however, address the potentially enormous resource requirements necessary to effectively monitor such reform for hundreds of corporate convicts—any forms of remedial orders or corporate probation currently in use require oversight, a point I return to in the following section. Moore (1987: 395–396) suggests a form of corporate incapacitation, whereby a corporation may be limited in the type of economic activity or regions in which it could legitimately operate. This is logically related to contract compliance, via which the buyer of corporate goods and services imposes conditions upon the way in which those goods and services are delivered. Such contract compliance is used ubiquitously where central or local government—major customers of the private sector, and increasingly so, as states divest themselves of ever more functions—are the purchaser, and there is absolutely no reason why these contractual terms cannot include those preventing health and safety harms. Failure to deliver on the conditions of such a contract means that the corporation is prevented from bidding for future tenders. Similarly, Braithwaite and Geis (1982: 307) argue for sentences which would limit the charter of a company by preventing it from continuing those aspects of its operations where it had seriously failed to respect the law. They also consider ‘capital punishment for the corporation’. This would entail the imposition of a ‘death penalty’, which could be accomplished through absolute revocation of a corporation’s charter, nationalisation, or being put into the hands of a receiver. Moreover, to preserve jobs as well as the goods and services provided by the firm, the assets of the offending company could be sold or otherwise transferred to a new parent company or companies with an established record of compliance with the law.

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The considerations in this section thus far lead us to the view that in responding to corporate harm, a key aim must be to disrupt the corporation, both in terms of how and where it operates. Either approach entails challenging the power of the corporation to operate as freely as it would otherwise prefer. Thus, this principle of disruption opens up other possibilities for responding to, and preventing further, corporate harm, crime and violence. Moreover, these tend to transcend the use of criminal law and thus the terrain upon which criminology tends to operate. In this context, I return to the issues of fines and, specifically, to Coffee’s (1981) argument for a system of ‘equity’ fines against owners of corporations on conviction—a reform which, inter alia, is designed precisely to undermine the integrity of the corporate veil. This proposal for ‘equity fines’ entails offending companies being ordered by a court or regulatory authority to issue a set number of new shares in the firm. The shares would then be controlled by a state-controlled compensation fund. More radically, these could be handed over to a victims’ or a campaigning organisation, or a (relevant) trades union. This process, which effectively dilutes the value of shares held by the owners of the company, prevents the corporation from simply passing on the costs of a sanction to customers through price increases or to workers through job or wage cuts, since the funds for investment would not be depleted, merely reallocated from existing shareholders to the compensation fund. Such proposals were debated—though rejected—by the Scottish Parliament in 2010.5 There are further, logically related demands, to be pursued through other bodies of law, and these can be activated as a response to corporate crime and harm, including corporate violence. Numerous proposals exist for reform of company law, not least those which enable a diverse range of stakeholders to be increasingly empowered; these range from weak reforms to corporate governance, to rights of and protections for whistle-blowers (however limited and individualising such forms of challenge may be), can have some minor progressive effect (Pemberton et al. 2012), through to legally facilitating the strength of collective organisation and corporate oversight from within companies.

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A key example here, crucial in the context of health and safety protection in the UK, is legally protected rights inside companies. Thus, firms with legally protected, effective trade union safety representatives and safety committees have half as many recorded injuries as those where these countervailing sources of power do not exist (James and Walters 2002; Reilly et al. 1995; Walters et al. 2005). Legally protected workers’ rights at best place inspectorial oversight within workplaces, on a daily basis, by those who know the details of a job and workplace most intimately. Violations of law can be immediately responded to, as workers stop-the-job or impose Provisional Improvement Notices (PINs) on their managements, requiring improvements to plant or process by a certain date with the threat of work then being stopped. Roving safety representatives, moving across different workplaces, can play similar roles where workplaces are not organised. Each of these rights exists in certain jurisdictions. It is important to emphasise the level of disruption at issue here: such workers’ rights impinge upon capital’s tendency towards maximising profitability, allowing organised workers to challenge management’s expropriated rights to manage, and hence generate a surplus as freely as they wish. It is no coincidence, then, that the central demand of ‘The Hazards Campaign Charter’6 is about extending safety representatives’ rights, thus: Hazards Campaign demand: Full recognition and enforcement of existing safety reps’ rights and the establishment of additional rights, including the right to be Roving Reps, serve Provisional Improvement Notices (PINS),7 refuse dangerous work by stopping the job, and to fully participate in all aspects of health and safety in the workplace.8 In this context, Snider’s (1991) analysis of the emergence and level of regulation is useful, and revolved around two central sets of claims. She argued, first, that regulation must be understood dialectically, via a dynamic complexity of ‘specific mechanisms’ which affect ‘‘the balance of power between the regulated firm and the regulatory agency’’ (Snider 1991: 210). Second, these relationships need to be set in the context of a similarly dynamic set of relations between the state and capital, and between the state ‘‘and the broad electorate, as represented by relevant pressure groups’’ (ibid.). Through this at once simple yet sensitive

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schema, Snider analyses four areas of regulation, including ‘occupational health and safety laws’. On occupational health and safety, she notes that crucial considerations are that: occupational health and safety is not viewed as necessary for capitalist survival; enforcement in this context may be antithetical to capitalist interests (in terms of a direct attack on profitability; see Nichols and Armstrong 1973; Szasz 1984); states are most likely only to make symbolic efforts to regulate. But the key observation here is that pro-regulatory forces are potentially strong since they are most likely to originate in organised labour, making opposition to corporate freedoms here more viable and achievable in this context than many others, thus altering what Wright calls the balance of possibilities for transformation (Wright 2010: 1–29). Moreover, there is an opportunity for real political traction here, since the imagery of victimisation has the potential to be powerful in this context. To this it might be added that the key problem for employers are fatal injuries—since these are immediate, visible, perhaps attract wider public sympathy, and are easily associated with a specific employer and, perhaps, working conditions or practices. This is in contrast to ill health, which often has such long incubation periods and causal chains that any company evades virtually all responsibility for these. Quite differently, in the realm of criminal law, we can still identify reforms which have the potential to be transformative—that is, which maintain the potential for more radical reform, rather than ultimately bolstering the power of capital through a limited instrumentalism, a mere symbolism, or indeed both. Key contemporary examples of legal reforms which might radically undermine the legal protections which corporations currently enjoy are those which seek to pierce the corporate veil—that ideological and material, legal construction through which the corporate form exists as if independent of those who own and control it, guaranteeing a compartmentalisation of legal (and moral) liability. A key instance of this was the possibility, during the tortuous passage of the CMCH Act, that positive duties as regards health and safety might be placed upon directors; thus an early Home Office consultation document on the law proposed that, alongside a corporation being convicted for manslaughter, company directors should be able to

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be disqualified if it is found that their conduct has ‘contributed’ to the company committing the offence, while the Government also stated that it ‘‘would welcome comments’’ on whether company directors should be able to be prosecuted for such conduct (Home Office 2000). Ultimately, organised lobbying from employers organisations, and notably the Institute of Directors,9 saw the potential criminalisation of Directors removed from the law. Yet, this debate represented a sustained period in which there was a genuine possibility to pierce the corporate veil. Similar proposals continue to circulate in the context of legal liability for workplace killings that precisely establish a clear legal relationship between such deaths, the corporate form, and the senior officers and shareholders of that corporation. These are potentially radical, and are on various political agendas (Tombs and Whyte 2015: 173–175). Thus, the key task must be to attack the legal basis upon which corporate power and irresponsibility are constituted—legal personhood, from which follows so many of the features of the corporate form. It is no coincidence, then, that ending legal personhood was one of the original demands of Occupy Wall Street.10 Although those proposals are hardly likely to be adopted in any meaningful form, they are visible on mainstream political agendas and they are beginning to be visible in some academic work that has engaged politically with the possibility of reforming or abolishing limited liability protections (Plesch and Blankenburg 2008; Blankenburg et al. 2010). The debate on the privileges afforded by the legal construction of corporations as ‘persons’ also reached the US Congress when Bernie Sanders, Senator for Vermont, introduced a Bill to abolish the recognition of corporate persons in the US constitution in December 2011.11 The Bill sought to overturn a decision made by the US Supreme Court in January 2010. In this case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to fund parties standing in elections. Although the Bill fell, similar Bills have been supported in several state legislatures.12 The Bill also gave impetus to a wider movement based around the umbrella organisation ‘Move to Amend’ that has developed a popular basis for the campaign against corporate personhood.13

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Beyond the Corporation, Beyond Crime, Beyond Criminology? The full recognition of the political and ideological character of ‘deviance’ must lead to a politics of defensive and prefigurative rights struggles … and to a moral politics which challenges the immorality of many social censures and their selective application (Sumner 1990: 36). The proposals and considerations set out in the previous section, however radical they may appear, can only at the moment be an interim demand and tactic in the abolition of the corporate form per se. But this transformative goal is furthered through the kinds of intermediate demands indicated because each has the effect of disrupting, disturbing and undermining the legal bases upon which the corporation is structured. Thus there are wider challenges to be faced than legal reform. We should be continually demanding that a range of services should be (re-) nationalised and taken out of the for-profit sector, as the latter demonstrates its inability to deliver these according to its own promise, and as the state consistently demonstrates its inabilities to hold consistent corporate failure to account. Thus we must also challenge corporate claims of efficiency, of freedom, of choice, of autonomy from (and superiority over) government, claims which are disproven for all of us on a daily basis, perhaps so obvious that we almost become anaesthetised to the supporting rhetorics of corporate power? At the same time, we must seek out, document and evaluate experiments in alternative forms of delivering goods and services—they have long existed and continue to exist all across the globe. There is a plethora of ways in which the production, distribution and sale of goods and services can be organised which depart from archetypal capitalist corporate model (Wright 2010: 191–269), including a variety of social and employee-owned enterprises, community-based public offerings and co-operatives. Each of these deserves our interest and evaluation, and might offer the basis for ‘envisioning real utopias’ (ibid.). In so doing, we must transcend the criminological, even critical criminological, goal of seeking to control the corporation through

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criminal law. Rather, our starting point must be the realisation that the corporation cannot be effectively regulated nor reformed: not through corporate social responsibility, not through reforming regulatory and enforcement regimes, not through tinkering with corporate structures, functions or its functionaries. It is an essentially destructive, irresponsible phenomenon. And it is its fundamentally destructive and anti-social nature that means the goal of resistance to the corporation must be the abolition of the corporation. And in this task, we must both stand on and at the same time remove ourselves from the terrains of both ‘crime’ and ‘criminology’. One of the common themes of my academic career has been to work with victims of corporate crime, most notably those who have been bereaved by workplace death, and, more recently, by deaths at the hand of the state. Notwithstanding variations in their experiences, typically such victims experience what has been commonly referred to as ‘doublevictimisation’—first, the avoidable death of a loved one at the hands of an employing organisation or state institution and, second, the consistent inabilities of the criminal justice system to treat, which generally means adequately investigate and let alone consider any formal response to, such a death as if it were potentially analogous to a ‘real’ killing, and in so doing to deny the dead and the bereaved their status as actual or potential victims (Snell and Tombs 2011). In their campaigns, organisations such as Families Against Corporate Killers (FACK)14 seek not vengeance, but rather, and of course to generalise, they want an investigation of the circumstances of their loved ones’ deaths, recognition—if appropriate—that their loved one has died as a result of legal violation, and then for an appropriate formal sanction to be imposed following due process—in short, and following other organisations which campaign against corporate and state injustice, they seek ‘truth, justice and accountability’,15 where the law, criminal justice and judicial systems legitimate themselves on promises for such. In this ‘censurious age’ (Sumner 2016: 98), where the discursive and material power of ‘crime’ and the criminal justice system is deployed to denote the seriousness of certain categories of harms over others, these seem understandable and modest aims. Far from challenging, I have actively supported such families, such as I can, and will continue

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to do so. Yet at the same time, however, it seems absolutely obvious to me that a criminal justice response to work-related deaths, injuries or illness, or other forms of corporate and state crimes will not and cannot significantly mitigate their relentless toll in terms of lives lost and lives devastated. Indeed, this much is painfully obvious to the families such as those who constitute FACK. For while the criminal law may (albeit very rarely) provide them with a formal recognition of a criminally defined harm against their loved one, this does not begin to touch the harms to which they are subject as a result of the death. As indicated above, these harms—which might include a loss of income; mental health problems which manifest themselves in a variety of ways; the loss of friends, who do not know how to speak about or deal with the death; problems of alcohol or drug dependency, in turn creating problems for gaining or seeking employment, or parenting, or of maintaining relationships—are matters of social and public policy well beyond the criminal law or criminal justice system. Such considerations take us not simply beyond crime, but beyond criminology (Hillyard et al. 2004b). In developing what beyond criminology means, there is a great deal of work to be done (Hillyard and Tombs 2017). In this respect, Colin Sumner’s following claim is prescient, pressing, yet remains, sadly, premature: Criminology could and would never be the same again. The ‘causes of crime’ gradually lost its meaning and value as an intelligible research agenda, being replaced, at least intellectually in principle, by two new seminal research programmes that go hand in hand: (1) the historical etymology and structural elucidation of the social censures of crime, and (2) zemiology, the study of social harms and the way societies selectively neglect some and punish others. These programmes will eventually move us beyond the behavioural concept of crime forever. The moral-political component of orthodox or state criminologies had been revealed and there is no going back. In years to come, even though we will probably still be struggling with questions of what to criminalise and how, we will smile at the very idea that the state categories of crime dominated our moral compass and governed our criminology for so long (Sumner 2015: 207).

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Notes 1. A “UK-wide network of resource centres and campaigners” which “supports those organising and campaigning for justice and safety at work”; http://www.hazardscampaign.org.uk/about. 2. In 2001, Union Carbide Corporation became a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company. 3. Source http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/prosecutions.htm. 4. HSE, Alternative penalties for health and safety offences, http://www. hse.gov.uk/consult/condocs/penalties.htm#alternative. 5. The Criminal Sentencing (Equity Fines) (Scotland) Bill (SB 10–54) was introduced and debated at the committee stages of the Scottish Parliament on the 1 June 2010. 6. See note 1, above. The Campaign Charter sets out its key demands on Government. 7. PINs have long been advocated by the Hazards movement, a right first won in Victoria, Australia, where safety reps were given the legal power to impose a Provisional Improvement Notice; this is a notice whereby workers’ representatives have the power to stop the job when there is an imminent danger, only re-commencing where the hazard is addressed and law complied with. PINs, thus, represent a legal challenge to managements’ ‘rights’ to manage and grant power to those who best know the hazards of any job. 8. The Hazards Campaign Charter, at http://www.hazardscampaign.org. uk/charter/newcharter.htm. 9. The key UK body which represents individual directors, senior managers and ‘entrepreneurs’. 10. See Detailed List of Demands & Overview of Tactics for Dc Protest, at http://occupywallst.org/forum/detailed-list-of-demands-overview-oftactics-for-d/. 11. A series of cases dating back to 1819 have asserted that corporate persons have the same rights as real persons. Those rights have been most famously asserted under the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which was introduced after the abolition of slavery to give all persons equal rights before the law. In a key judgement, the US Supreme Court in Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania (125 U.S. 181; 1888) decided: ‘Under the designation of ‘person’ there is no doubt that a private corporation is included [in the

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Fourteenth Amendment]. Those rights have been invoked by corporations to claim the right as ‘citizen’ to participate in the funding of political parties and to use the courts to challenge state regulatory laws and rules. 12. Sourcewatch provides a guide to those states: http://www.sourcewatch. org/index.php/Move_To_Amend. 13. See https://movetoamend.org/. 14. http://www.hazardscampaign.org.uk/fack/about/index.htm. 15. The ‘strapline’ of INQUEST; see http://www.inquest.org.uk/.

References Bakan, J. (2004). The corporation: The pathological pursuit of profit and power. Toronto: Viking Canada. Blankenburg, S., Plesch, D., & Wilkinson, F. (2010). Limited liability and the modern corporation in theory and in practice. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34, 821–836. Box, S. (1983). Power, crime and mystification. London: Tavistock. Braithwaite, J. (1985). To punish or persuade: Enforcement of coal-mine safety. Albany: State University of New York Press. Braithwaite, J., & Geis, G. (1982). On theory and action for corporate crime control. Crime and Delinquency, 28(2), 292–314. Catley, B. (2003). Philosophy—The luxurious supplement of violence. Paper presented at Critical Management Studies 2003. Lancaster, July, available at www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/proceedings/philosophy/catley.pdf. Clarke, M. (2000). Regulation. The social control of business between law and politics. London: Macmillan. Coffee, J. (1981). “No Soul to Damn, no Body to Kick”: An unscandalised essay on the problem of corporate punishment. Michigan Law Review, 79(3), 386–459. Cohen, M., March, J., & Olsen, P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1), 1–25. Croall, H. (2005). Penalties for corporate homicide. Paper prepared for the Scottish Executive Expert Group on Corporate Homicide. August 17, http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/11/14133559/36003.

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Dowie, M. (1987). Pinto madness. In S. Hills (Ed.), Corporate violence: Injury and death for profit (pp. 13–29). New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield. Engels, F. (1969 [1845]). The condition of the working class in England. St Albans: Panther Books. Etzioni, A. (1993). The US sentencing commission on corporate crime: A critique. In G. Geis & P. Jesliow (Eds.), The annals of the american academy of political and social science. White-collar crime (Vol. 525, pp. 147–156). Fisse, B., & Braithwaite, J. (1993). Corporations, Crime and Accountability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191. Hämäläinen, P., Saarela, K., & Takala, J. (2009). Global trend according to estimated number of occupational accidents and fatal work-related diseases at region and country level. Journal of Safety Research, 40, 125–139. Health and Safety Executive. (2016). Health and safety at work. Summary statistics for Great Britain 2016. London: Health and Safety Executive. Health and Safety Executive. (n.d.). Costs to Britain of workplace injuries and new cases of work-related ill health. Great Britain 2014/2015, http://www. hse.gov.uk/statistics/cost.htm. Hillyard, P., & Tombs, S. (2004). Beyond criminology? In P. Hillyard, C.  Pantazis, S. Tombs, & D. Gordon (Eds.), Beyond criminology? Taking harm seriously (pp. 10–29). London: Pluto Press. Hillyard, P., & Tombs, S. (2017). Social harm and zemiology. In McAra, A. Liebling, & S. Maruna (Eds.), Oxford handbook of criminology (6th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press (in Press). Hillyard, P., Pantazis, C., Tombs, S., & Gordon, D. (Eds.). (2004a). Beyond criminology? Taking harm seriously. London: Pluto Press. Hillyard, P., Sim, J., Tombs, S., & Whyte, D. (2004b). Leaving a “stain upon the silence”: Contemporary criminology and the politics of dissent. British Journal of Criminology, 44(3), 369–390. Home Office. (2000). Reforming the law on involuntary manslaughter: The government’s proposals. London: Home Office Communication Directorate. James, P., & Walters, D. (2002). Worker representation in health and safety: Options for regulatory reform. Industrial Relations Journal, 33(2), 141–156. Kreisberg, S. M. (1976). Decision-making models and the control of corporate crime. Yale Law Journal, 85, 1091–1129. Macrory, R. (2006). Regulatory justice: Making sanctions effective. Final report. London: Better Regulation Executive.

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Moore, C. A. (1987). Taming the giant corporation? Some cautionary remarks on the deterrability of corporate crime. Crime & Delinquency, 33(2), 379–402. Nichols, T., & Armstrong, P. (1973). Safety or profit: Industrial accidents and the conventional wisdom. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. O’Neill, R., Pickvance, S., & Watterson, A. (2007). Burying the evidence: How Great Britain is prolonging the occupational cancer epidemic. International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, 4, 428–436. Pearce, F., & Tombs, S. (1998). Toxic capitalism: Corporate crime and the chemical industry. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pemberton, S., Tombs, S., Chan, M., & Seal, L. (2012). Whistleblowing, organisational harm and the self-regulating organisation. Policy & Politics, 40(2), 263–279. Plesch, D., & Blankenburg, S. (2008). How to make corporations accountable. Liverpool: Institute of Employment Rights. Punch, M. (1996). Dirty business—Explaining corporate misconduct. London: Sage. Reilly, B., Pace, P., & Hall, P. (1995). Unions, safety committees and workplace injuries. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 33(2), 273–288. Reiman, J. (1998). The rich get richer, the poor get prison. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Salmi, J. (1993). Violence and democratic society. New approaches to human rights. London: Zed Books. Sentencing Council. (2015). Health and safety offences, corporate manslaughter and food safety and hygiene offences. Definitive guideline. London: Sentencing Council. Slapper, G., & Tombs, S. (1999). Corporate crime. London: Longman. Snell, K., & Tombs, S. (2011). How do you get your voice heard when no-one will let you? Victimisation at work. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 11(3), 207–223. Snider, L. (1991). The regulatory dance: Understanding reform processes in corporate crime. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 19, 206–236. Snider, L. (1993). Bad business: Corporate crime in Canada. Toronto: Nelson. Sumner, C. (1979). Reading ideologies: An investigation into the Marxist theory of ideology and law. London: Academic Press.

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Sumner, C. (1990). Rethinking deviance: Towards a sociology of censure. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. 15–40). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1996). Introduction: The violence of censure and the censure of violence. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Violence, culture and censure (pp. 1–6). London: Taylor & Francis. Sumner, C. (1997). The decline of social control and the rise of vocabularies of struggle. In R. Bergalli & C. Sumner (Eds.), Social control and political order (pp. 131–150). London: Sage. Sumner, C. (2004). Crime, deviance and society. In C. Sumner (Ed.), The blackwell companion to criminology (pp. 3–31). Oxford: Blackwell. Sumner, C. (2014). Best of capitalism over by 2060, with no way to identify the villains? Crime talk, 14 December, http://www.crimetalk.org.uk/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=939:best-of-capitalism-overby-2060-with-no-way-to-identify-the-villains&catid=946:eds-blog-articles&Itemid=292. Sumner, C. (2015). Critical realism, overdetermination and social censure. In D. Crewe & R. Lippens (Eds.), What is criminology about? Philosophical reflections (pp. 195–209). Abingdon: Routledge. Sumner, C. (2016). Measure for measure: Justice in the society of censure. In M. Jacobsen (Ed.), The poetics of crime: Understanding and researching crime and deviance through creative sources (pp. 97–118). London: Routledge. Sutherland, E. (1983). White collar crime. The uncut version. New Haven: Yale University Press. Szasz, A. (1984). Industrial resistance to occupational safety and health legislation, 1971–1981. Social Problems, 32(2), 103–116. Tombs, S. (2007). “Violence”, safety crimes and criminology. British Journal of Criminology, 47(4), 531–550. Tombs, S. (2014). Hard evidence: Are work-related deaths in decline? The conversation, 29 October, https://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-are-workrelated-deaths-in-decline-33553. Tombs, S. (2015). Crisis, what crisis? Regulation and the academic orthodoxy. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 54(1), 57–72. Tombs, S. (2016). Social protection after the crisis: Regulation without enforcement?. Bristol: Policy Press. Tombs, S., & Whyte, D. (2007). Safety crimes. Cullompton: Willan. Tombs, S., & Whyte, D. (2014). Toxic capital everywhere: Mapping the coordinates of regulatory tolerance. Social Justice, 41(1/2), 28–48.

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Tombs, S., & Whyte, D. (2015). The corporate criminal. Why corporations must be abolished. London: Routledge. Tombs, S., & Whyte, D. (2017). Worker health and safety. In H. Pontelled (Ed.), Oxford research Encyclopaedia of criminology and criminal justice. New York: Oxford University Press (in Press). Walters, D., Nichols, T., Conner, J., Tasiran, A., & Cam, S. (2005). The role and effectiveness of safety representatives in influencing workplace health and safety (HSE Research Report 363). London: HSE Books. Wright, E. O. (2010). Envisioning real utopias. London: Verso.

Author Biography Steve Tombs  is Professor of Criminology at the Open University. He has a long-standing interest in the incidence, nature and regulation of corporate crime. His most recent book is Social Protection after the Crisis (Policy, 2016). He is also co-author, with Dave Whyte, of The Corporate Criminal: why corporations must be abolished (Routledge, 2015), Regulatory Surrender: death, injury and the non-enforcement of law (Institute of Employment Rights, 2010), A Crisis of Enforcement: the decriminalisation of death and injury at work (Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 2008) and Safety Crimes (Willan, 2007), as well as Corporate Crime (Longman, 1999), with Gary Slapper, Toxic Capitalism (Ashgate, 1998, Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1999), with Frank Pearce, and People in Organisations (Blackwell, 1996). He coedited State, Power, Crime (Sage, 2009), Beyond Criminology? (Pluto Press, 2004), Criminal Obsessions (Crime and Society Foundation, 2005, 2008), Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful: scrutinising states and corporations (Peter Lang, 2003) and Risk, Management and Society (Kluwer-Nijhoff, 2000). He works closely with the Hazards movement in the UK and is a Trustee and Board member of Inquest.

Idealism, Violence and Censure James Hardie-Bick

Introduction Colin Sumner (1997) has emphasised the importance of examining the darkest aspects of the human condition and his theory of social censure has proved influential for a number of studies that have explored a range of unsettling practices. This chapter builds on Sumner’s (1990, 1997, 2015) research by drawing attention to the work of Erich Fromm and Ernest Becker. Whilst there are important differences between their approaches, both theorists directly address the unconscious desires that motivate people to engage in extreme violence and other forms of destructive behaviour. Fromm’s Escape from Freedom ([1941] 1969) and Becker’s Escape from Evil (1975) provide theoretical insights into understanding how violence, aggression and evil can shelter people from an overwhelming sense of existential vulnerability and isolation.

J. Hardie-Bick (*)  University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_9

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Whereas Fromm focuses his attention on the destructive psychological mechanisms people employ to escape feeling isolated and insecure, Becker highlights the connections between violence and idealism and shows how evil often arises out of the intentions people have to make the world a better place to live. The main themes addressed by Fromm and Becker will be discussed in relation to Cottee and Hayward’s (2011) research on the existential attractions of engaging in terrorist acts. The chapter concludes by considering the different ideas put forward by Fromm and Becker concerning the possibility for living in a more open, tolerant and less destructive world.

Social Censure Colin Sumner’s work on social censure addresses the relationship between what is being censured with the political economy and culture of society. Sumner argues that moral censures can only be understood in relation to the ‘ideologies which constitute them and the economic, political and cultural contexts which generate, sustain and precipitate their use’ (Sumner 1990: 17). This explanation helps to elucidate why beliefs about what constitutes deviant behaviour often ‘exclude what should be included’ and ‘include what should be excluded’ (1990: 26). In addition to this, censures such as extremists, thieves, rioters, murderers, looters and scroungers all have the potential to generate public support for targeting specific sections of the population. Censures are therefore more than descriptions of behaviour that transgress social norms. Censures should be understood as moral, political and ideological discourses that aim to marginalise, exclude and regulate behaviour. Taking into account the variety of historical, ideological and structural contexts that shape the meaning of different censures, it is necessary to ask the following questions: What does the censure (e.g. vandalism) mean? When was it first used? And against whom? Who was behind it and who enforced it? What ideological concepts give it such a meaning? What was the political and structural context of its application? Of course, there are many other associated researches which need to be done…. This perspective, in my

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view, generates many questions, many research projects, many theoretical developments, and many policy implications (Sumner 1990: 31). All of the above questions are necessary and important (see Amatrudo 1997; Raup 1997; Valier 1997). In addition to studies that examine how censures are shaped by political, cultural and ideological contexts, there is also a need to understand why people willingly internalise censures (Craig 1997). The specific aim of this chapter is to make a contribution to one of the ‘associated researches that need to be done’ by addressing what motivates people to censure and demonise other people. As Sumner (1997: 3) notes, ‘there is a latent violence in censure and a latent censure in violence’ and both Fromm and Becker provide compelling explanations concerning the motives that lead people to intentionally engage in harmful, violent and destructive behaviour. Before addressing their work, I will first draw attention to Cottee and Hayward’s (2011) important article on the existential attractions that motivate people to engage in extreme forms of violence. Whilst Fromm and Becker are not cited in this paper, their work on self-doubt, uncertainty and meaninglessness support and further develop Cottee and Hayward’s original analysis.

A Distinctive Way of Being Cottee and Hayward (2011) specifically address the existential attractions of engaging in terrorism. They define terrorism as ‘political violence deliberately aimed at civilians or non-combatants’ and highlight how terrorist activities involve ‘high levels of violence, danger, risk, excitement, sacrifice and drama’ (Cottee and Hayward 2011: 965). Research on terrorism has shown that it is a fundamental error to think of terrorists as ‘crazy’ or ‘mindless’ psychopaths. One of the major research findings of terrorist studies shows that terrorists are psychologically normal and Cottee and Hayward (2011) suggest a variety of possible existential attractions that draw people to adopt a ‘life-mode or way of being’ that engages in terrorist activities. They define existential as primarily ‘a set of feelings, concerns, aspirations or desires relating to one’s moral self—to one’s being-in-the-world’ (2011: 965) and argue that for

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some terrorists, engaging in violent acts is an ‘existential choice’, a choice that is accompanied by a sense of adventure and ontological security. In this respect, they maintain that terrorism should be understood as being both an existential and political problem. To appreciate why terrorism is existentially attractive, they focus on the ‘edgy glamour’ terrorist organisations provide, the ‘driving mythologies’ that offer a sense of purpose and belonging together with ‘the glory accorded to the perpetrators of terrorist atrocities by their co-belligerents and supporters’ (2011: 966). The three core existential motives that Cottee and Hayward identify are the desire for excitement, the desire for ultimate meaning and the desire for glory. The desire for excitement focuses on what Katz (1988) refers to as the ‘phenomenological foreground’. Rather than concentrating on background factors (i.e. class, unemployment, poverty) to explain why people engage in criminal behaviour, this form of analysis concentrates on the emotional seductions and sensations that are provided by the experience itself. Focusing attention on the experiential foreground highlights feelings of excitement and captures the emotional and seductive feelings that serve to motivate further criminal acts. Drawing on a variety of personal testimonies, including vivid accounts from soldiers and terrorists, Cottee and Hayward discuss how the risks and dangers of committing destructive and brutal acts of violence can be emotionally intense, exciting and addictive. One of the many examples Cottee and Hayward cite to illustrate this is provided by a radicalised American citizen: I have become a Somali you could say. I hear bullets, I dodge mortars, I hear nasheeds [Islamic songs] and play soccer. Sometimes I live in the bush with camels, sometimes I live the five-star life. Sometimes I walk for miles in the terrible heat with no water, sometimes I ride in extremely slick cars. Sometimes I’m chased by the enemy, sometimes I chase him! I have hatred, I have love. It’s the best life on Earth! (Omar Hammami cited in Cottee and Hayward 2011: 971)

Escaping from the everyday routines of his suburban American life, Omar Hammami found a sense of excitement, adventure and purpose in jihad and Somalia. Cottee and Hayward rightly question whether excitement should just be seen as a by-product of committing terrorist acts. Their analysis suggests that the inherent risks, adrenalin and

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excitement are central for understanding why people actively decide to choose this form of life (also see Hardie-Bick 2015; Hardie-Bick and Lippens 2011; Lippens 2009). Terrorists live a life of inherent risk and danger. At any time they could be captured, interrogated, tortured and imprisoned, they could be seriously wounded and, like many of their victims, they could also be killed. For some terrorists, such risks must exert ‘an excruciating psychological toll…. But for others, it may well be that the very dangers associated with terrorism are precisely what attracts them to it in the first place’ (2011: 972). The second existential motive Cottee and Hayward identify is the desire for ultimate meaning. Terrorist organisations provide their members with a strong sense of self-identity. This prescribed sense of identity is embedded within a meaningful worldview that supplies a powerful narrative concerning their identity and place in the world. Terrorist groups also provide a sense of ultimate meaning for their recruits. Cottee and Hayward describe this as ‘the feeling that one is an active participant in a cosmic battle to defend the sacred’ (2011: 973). Their discussion of identity, meaning, belonging and solidarity shows how terrorists are motivated by solidarity and compassion to members of their own in-group. Whilst it is ‘morally troubling’ to describe terrorists as courageous, the willingness to sacrifice their own lives for their comrades suggests that this is an area that ‘deserves greater exploration as a possible source of terrorist motivation’ (2011: 975). The third and final existential motive is the desire for glory. Violent transgressions are often related to self-affirmative identity projects: In joining a terrorist group and in fighting for (as they see it) a sacred cause, terrorists may be giving dramatic expression to their sense of who they are or what they aspire to be. No doubt, to join a terrorist organization and to participate in its activities is to engage in a form of political behaviour, and terrorist attacks are intended to communicate a range of political meanings. But terrorist atrocities can also be existentially meaningful, serving to communicate a range of meanings about the selfhood of the terrorists themselves (Cottee and Hayward 2011: 975–976).

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Terrorists engage in extreme violence and cruelty, but their destructive behaviour is often viewed by the perpetrators as necessary for creating a better world. Terrorists do not necessarily recognise themselves as committing heinous and abhorrent acts (also see Baumeister and Campbell 1999). Terrorists may sincerely believe their intentions are admirable and honourable. Cottee and Hayward’s discussion of terrorists such Hafiz Hanif, Omar Hammami and Hosam Maher Husein Smadi reveal how the jihadist narrative allows recruits to see themselves as heroic. Indeed, part of the attraction of joining terrorist groups can be found in the recruits’ desire to redefine and immortalise ‘themselves as honorable and heroic figures’ (2011: 978). Engaging in brutal acts of violence in order to defend and promote a political cause can be personally transformative. Together these three existential motivations make a vital contribution to understanding the existential desires that can motivate people to engage in extreme acts of violence. Whilst there has been a good deal of criminological research on crime and excitement (Ferrell 2005; Katz 1988; Lyng 1990, 1993, 2004; Lyng et al. 2009; O’Malley and Mugford 1994), less is known about the other motives identified by Cottee and Hayward. The desires that drive people to search for ultimate meaning and glory are directly addressed by Fromm and Becker. Both theorists offer important psychoanalytic insights into understanding what motivates people to engage in the most extreme forms of inhumanity. The next section concentrates on Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. This work focuses on the relationship between modernity and identity and examines the problematic consequences that can accompany feelings of ontological security. The potential of this approach will be discussed in relation to the psychological attractions of extremism, which, as I will show, is further aided by Becker’s insightful analysis of death, heroism and immortality.

Uncertainty, Identity and Belonging In comparison to Adorno (1973), Marcuse (1964) and other theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, Fromm (1949, 1964, 1969, 1973, 2007, 2008) has been surprisingly marginalised and overlooked (McLaughlin 2014). Fromm starts his analysis by recognising that

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human beings are a distinct type of being, a being with self-consciousness that has the ability to question and reflect on the very nature of existence: Man transcends all other life because he is, for the first time, life aware of itself. Man is in nature, subject to its dictates and accidents, yet he transcends nature because he lacks the unawareness which makes the animal a part of nature—as one with it. Man is confronted with the frightening conflict of being the prisoner of nature, yet being free in his thoughts; being part of nature, and yet to be as it were a freak of nature; being neither here nor there. Human self-awareness has made man a stranger in the world, separate, lonely, and frightened (Fromm 1968: 117).

Fromm makes a distinction between primary and secondary ties. Primary ties are the ties that gave people a sense of ontological security. Fromm is specifically referring to the original pre-modern ties people had to the natural and social world. These are the ties that bind people to their community, to the church and to their social caste. Such identifications provided a strong sense of security as the individual was connected to ‘a structuralized whole in which he has an unquestionable place’ (1969: 34). Although Fromm recognises that human beings ‘transcend all other life’ because they lack ‘the unawareness’ of other animals, in pre-modern society the primary ties ensured that ‘this awareness remained very dim… while being partly aware of himself as a separate entity, he felt also part of the world around him’ (Fromm 1969: 23–24). The primary bonds that ‘chained’ people to their role in the social order provided a strong sense of security. What characterises modern from pre-modern society is the process of individuation, the growing awareness people had of themselves as free and independent beings. People are no longer identical to their role in the social order and primary ties are no longer able to restrict human development. Yet this new sense of freedom is accompanied by self-doubt and uncertainty. Rather than living with a secure and unquestioned place in the social order, the individual has to manage uncomfortable feelings of anxiety, doubt, aloneness and existential insecurity. The primary ties of pre-individualistic times no longer defend people from being tormented by doubt and

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uncertainty. Other ‘secondary bonds’ to provide a sense of certainty and belonging have to be found. Fromm argues that a ‘positive solution’ for living a productive life involves solidarity with others through the spontaneous activity of love and work. Nevertheless, this is only possible if the economic and social conditions encourage productive rather than exploitative relationships. Without the appropriate social, political and economic conditions necessary for being a free and self-reliant individual, and without the sense of security provided by primary ties, life can feel meaningless and lack direction. In these circumstances freedom itself becomes a burden. Fromm identifies two main strategies that allow people to surrender their individuality. One way to escape feelings of existential doubt is by uncritically conforming to accepted patterns of behaviour. This is central to the way people can escape feelings of powerlessness and aloneness in modern democracies. Automaton conformity is an escape mechanism that allows people to give up their individual self and live a life shaped by the prevailing values and cultural expectations. The person who surrenders their self in this way ‘becomes an automaton’ and is identical to ‘millions of other automatons’ (1969: 184). This escape mechanism involves the substitution of the self with a ‘pseudo self ’ whose identity relies on conforming to accepted expectations and continuously seeks the approval of others. The other main strategy of escaping the self that Fromm identifies involves submitting to a powerful leader. Fromm claims this is the main form of defence found in totalitarian societies. Authoritarianism is the mechanism of escape that captures most of Fromm’s attention in Escape from Freedom. His analysis of authoritarianism is particularly relevant for understanding the desire to censure and provides important insights into the motives that drive people to engage in extreme violence. Authoritarianism is defined as ‘the tendency to give up the independence of one’s own individual self and to fuse one’s self with somebody or something outside of oneself in order to acquire the strength which the individual self is lacking’ (Fromm 1969: 140). Merging one’s self in this way is desirable as these secondary bonds replace the security primary bonds once provided. Central to this mechanism of escape are strivings for submission and domination. Masochistic strivings refer to feelings

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of inferiority and powerlessness and Fromm highlights the psychological attractions of being dependent and weak. Whilst on a conscious level individuals may appear to be frustrated by their dependence on others, ‘unconsciously some power within themselves drives them to feel inferior or insignificant’ (1969: 141). In complete contrast to masochism, sadism refers to those individuals who enjoy having control over other people. The sadist aims to physically and/or psychologically dominate, hurt and humiliate other people. Fromm argues that one neglected aspect of the relationship between the sadist and their victim is that the sadist is dependent on the object of their sadistic impulses: While the masochistic person’s dependence is obvious, our expectation with regard to the sadistic person is just the reverse: he seems so strong and domineering, and the object of his sadism so weak and submissive, that it is difficult to think of the strong one as being dependent on the one over whom he rules. And yet close analysis shows that this is true. The sadist needs the person over whom he rules, he needs him very badly, since his own feeling of strength is rooted in the fact that he is the master over someone (1969: 144).

Fromm’s analysis emphasises how the sadist needs the masochist in the same way as the masochist needs the sadist. Although the desire to submit to the power and control of someone else seems to be the complete opposite of the sadist’s desire to hurt, manipulate, humiliate and control, both tendencies serve the same psychological function. The aim of both masochism and sadism is to achieve symbiosis. Masochism and sadism arise out of the need people have to escape feelings of isolation and self-uncertainty. The authoritarian and sadomasochistic desires identified by Fromm support many of Cottee and Hayward’s insights in relation to the psychological attractions of joining terrorist groups. The American Jihadist Omar Hammami (previously cited) claimed that he had both hatred and love. This is central to Fromm’s analysis concerning psychological attractions of sadism and masochism. Joining a terrorist group allows members to submit themselves to a group they believe is overwhelmingly strong. Members surrender their individuality and willingly

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embrace the group’s norms, values, beliefs and practices. Submitting to and internalising the overall aims of the group is rewarded by a strong sense of identity, solidarity and purpose. Members submit themselves to the values, attitudes and behaviour of the group and are rewarded with feelings of superiority to those outside their group. This creates a firm sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and can result in extreme forms of intolerance, violence and conflict (also see Sen 2006). Research on torture (Haritos-Fatouros 1988) and the Holocaust (Glover 2001; Staub 1989; Steiner 1980) confirms that perpetrators respect authority and like to feel part of a hierarchical system. As Staub (1999, 2002) notes, people who are responsible for extreme forms of inhumanity like to be led but they also enjoy feeling superior and having authority over others. Hogg’s social psychological research (2004, 2007, 2012a, b, 2014) provides further support for Fromm’s analysis and shows self-uncertainty to have a decisive role in motivating people to engage in destructive and violent behaviour. Hogg’s uncertainty–identity theory has addressed the connections between self-uncertainty and extremism (see Hogg 2004, 2012b, 2014). As Hogg states ‘one of the most powerful and effective ways to reduce self-uncertainty is to identify with a group by psychologically categorising oneself as a group member’ (Hogg 2012b: 22). Identifying with an extremist group is a particularly effective way of resolving issues of self-uncertainty: Extremist groups have closed and carefully guarded boundaries, uniform attitudes, values, and membership and inflexible customs. They are rigidly and hierarchically structured with a clearly delineated chain of authority, and substantial intolerance of internal dissent and criticism. Such groups are often ethnocentric, inward looking, and suspicious and disparaging of outsiders (Hogg 2012b: 25).

Extremist groups provide powerful guidelines concerning how individuals should think, feel and behave. Conforming to the norms and expectations of the group demonstrates their connection to a group of like-minded others, maintains the group’s boundaries and provides a sense of ontological security (Dasgupta et al. 1999; Lickel et al. 2000). Hogg’s uncertainty–identity theory also highlights the relevance of

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Fromm’s description of automaton conformity. By conforming to the group’s beliefs and values members are able to seek approval, reassurance and validation from influential others. Causing extreme harm to those outside their in-group affirms their social identity and reinforces their view of the world. Alongside authoritarianism, Fromm believed that automaton conformity is one of the main ways to escape feelings of existential doubt and insecurity. Authoritarianism and automaton conformity are relevant for understanding the psychological attractions of identifying with extremist groups. People in late modern society may have more freedom and opportunity to construct their own identity (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1996; Giddens 1991, 1994), but they also have to live with increasing levels of self-uncertainty and insecurity (also see Bauman 2001). As Young argues, the disembeddedness experienced in late modern society has generated ‘a vertigo of insecurity’ (2007: 141). Young also recognises the attractions of ‘inventing’ a sense of self-identity that is rigid and fixed rather than open and flexible. The problem that Young rightly identifies is that this fixed sense of self is ‘inevitably accompanied by the essentialising and denigration of the other’ (Young 2007: 141). There are divisive effects that can accompany the process of escaping uncertainty. As Fromm originally identified in Escape from Freedom, the strategies people employ to experience a firm sense of security and belonging can also lead to the denigration and humiliation of others who do not share their own in-group identity. Understanding how extremist groups offer recruits a strong sense of identity and belonging makes an important contribution to understanding why members are willing to engage in violent and destructive behaviour.

Idealism, Heroism and Evil Fromm’s analysis concerning the burden of existential isolation and aloneness directly influenced Ernest Becker’s (1971, 1975, 1997) understanding of the human condition. Fromm emphasised how human reason, imagination and self-awareness create a dilemma that no other animal has to live with. Human beings can contemplate

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their own limitations and powerlessness and visualise their own death (Fromm 1949). How people cope living with the knowledge of their own impending mortality is the central theme of Becker’s work. Like Fromm, Becker starts his analysis by recognising how distinctive the human animal is. The human being is ‘the only “time binding” animal’ who lives with ‘a notion of past-present-future’ (Becker 1971: 16). Human beings are aware of their own self-awareness and can contemplate their past experiences, reflect on their present circumstances and imagine future possibilities. This ‘time stream’ is continuously being scanned and assessed. This self-objectivity means that human beings can take a step back from themselves and view themselves as objects: We get a feeling of this in the formula “I can think of me.” In other words, “I am conscious of experiences happening to me; I am not simply undergoing experiences, but I am experiencing myself.” No other animal can give this rich substance, this added dimension, to itself…“Look I’m jumping!” The fact is momentous: Man is the only animal—in the universe, for all we know—who sees himself as an object, who can dwell on his own experiences and on his fate. It is this that makes him fully and truly human; it is the most interesting fact about him (Becker 1971: 23).

This distinctive form of self-awareness opens up new exciting and imaginative possibilities, but it is also a curse. Self-reflexivity ensures that human beings have to live with a ‘tragic bind’ that other animals manage to escape. Human beings are aware of themselves as unique individuals, but at the same time humans also have to live with the knowledge of their own mortality. Human beings know they reside in a material body that will inevitably ‘pass into dust and oblivion’ (1997: 201). This is described by Becker as the problem of individuality-within-finitude and is the main existential paradox that human beings are forced to live with. To successfully cope with this basic existential predicament people need to distract themselves from full self-awareness. As Becker states, people need to lie to themselves to disguise the fact that they live in a body that will inevitably decay and die. The first form of defence against the fear of death is described as the ‘vital lie’. The vital lie acknowledges

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the necessity of being dishonest ‘about oneself and one’s whole situation’ (Becker 1997: 55). It is necessary to be dishonest in order to build suitable defences to protect against overwhelming feelings of existential anxiety and ontological insecurity. When people strongly identify with their social roles they are also constructing a sense of meaning, purpose, stability, power and self-worth that keeps their fear of death unconscious. This is the ‘character armour’ that protects people from thoughtful living and makes self-confident, routine activities possible. Without these distractions people would have to confront ‘the full flood of despair, the full realization of the true human condition’ (1997: 57). It is too devastating to directly confront this terrifying paradox. People build defences to distract themselves from the ‘real nature of the world’ (1997: 63) so they carry on as if ‘the vital truths’ about the human condition had not yet been discovered. The other main form of defence is provided by the desire to stand out, to make a difference, to be heroic. The need for feelings of heroism is central to Becker’s research and is understood to be a direct consequence of the universal terror of death. Becker views all societies as ‘symbolic action systems’ providing ‘a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules of behaviour, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism’ (1997: 4). Becker argues that what people really fear is ‘extinction with insignificance’ (1975: 4). People need to believe that their lives will make a lasting contribution to their cultural world view and will continue to influence people after they die: It doesn’t matter whether the cultural-hero system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count (Becker 1997: 5).

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People need to feel they live in a world of meaning. They need to believe they are valued by others and that their actions have the potential to make a positive and enduring contribution to society. One way to achieve this is by making a difference to literature, architecture, art, academia, music or poetry. Another way could be to make important scientific discoveries that improve health or reduce inequality. Whether people manage to achieve the ‘high’ heroism of people like Winston Churchill or the more mundane everyday heroic actions of parents, social workers, doctors or police officers, all forms of heroism protect people from the prospect of dying without significance. By making a positive and lasting contribution to the ‘cultural hero system’ people are able to symbolically transcend death. Whilst the urge to ‘cosmic heroism’ often leads to altruistic and noble actions, Becker identifies serious problems that accompany the search for meaning and stability. As Becker explains, war, torture, violence and genocide are often the result of heroic attempts to isolate and eradicate evil in an attempt to make the world a better place: The man who dropped the atomic bomb is the warm, gentle boy who grew up next door. The kings of Dahomey who signalled annually for the heads of hundreds of murdered prisoners to be piled in heaps very likely had a child-rearing experience that Margaret Mead could have written about favourably. The reason is positive and simple: man aggresses not only out of frustration and fear but out of joy, plenitude, love of life. Men kill lavishly out of the sublime joy of heroic triumph over evil (Becker 1975: 141).

The desire to achieve a heroic image of ourselves can have disastrous consequences. The paradox of evil is that suffering, terror and violence can result from the good intentions people have to identify, fight and oppose evil. Once convinced their cause is legitimate and worthwhile, people are willing to sacrifice their lives and kill others in a heroic fight. The problem of heroics is understood by Becker to be the central problem of life. Even if cultural world views do successfully provide a sense of order, security and self-worth, there will always be a certain amount of death anxiety that is repressed and projected onto others.

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Becker’s  claims are now supported by numerous social psychological experiments on mortality salience. As Solomon et al. (2015) have shown, asking people to think and reflect on their own mortality often generates hostile reactions, even though participants claim not to be concerned by such thoughts (also see Rosenblatt et al. 1989; Solomon et al. 1991, 1998). These research findings have repeatedly shown how unconscious fears of mortality affect our everyday lives. Becker’s theory of evil identifies the relationship between idealism and destructive human behaviour. His theory explains how Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao Zedong and Pol Pot can all be responsible for extreme forms of violence, cruelty and genocide and still firmly believe that their actions are contributing to improving humanity. As Glover noted in his discussion of the Nazi moral identity, the SS were able to commit increasingly atrocious acts and could still ‘think of themselves as showing heroism, remaining morally pure themselves at the same time as overcoming revulsion against atrocities in order to obey the commands of duty’ (Glover 2001: 358). A pertinent example is provided by Lifton in his disturbing and insightful study of Nazi doctors. The Nazi doctor Fritz Klein justified mass killing and claimed that his actions did not contradict the Hippocratic Oath: Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind (Cited in Lifton 2000: 16).

The atrocities of Stalinism and Maoism caused the death of over 20 million people and further highlight the connection between utopian projects and mass murder. These campaigns of mass murder and violence were directly related to the idealistic project of creating a utopian society based on equality and dignity. People killed others because they believed their actions to be necessary for achieving a utopian society (Baumeister and Campbell 1999). Under Pol Pot’s leadership in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge killed out of desire to create a new society based on social equality. The Khmer Rouge viewed their victims as opposing human betterment. People were motivated by a higher ideal

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that justified their hatred towards anyone they believed to have previously benefitted from an unjust society (Staub 1989, 1999). Becker’s research on idealistic evil and heroism concurs with the existential motives identified by Cottee and Hayward. As Cottee and Hayward recognise, the dream of being heroic is a narrative found in many other secular and non-secular terrorist organisations. Individuals are provided with a sense of ultimate meaning, they can defend a cause they firmly believe in and make heroic sacrifices by fighting a war against those they believe to be an aggressive and oppressive adversary. Becker is arguing the desire for heroism is a direct and necessary response to living with mortality awareness. Becker claims that all forms of evil that humans are responsible for are based on strategies people use to deny their insignificance. Indeed, the ‘driving force’ of violence, war and genocide arises from the strategies people employ to cope with their mortality awareness. The aim is to prove that one has made a difference, ‘that one is something special’ (Becker 2005: 220). Becker is explaining why people censure and scapegoat ‘filthy’ others for bringing chaos and disorder into society. As Becker stated, the idealistic and heroic attempts to identify and eradicate evil have made ‘the earth an even more eager graveyard than it naturally is’ (1975: 96).

Extremism, Violence and Self-Esteem The existential strategies and coping mechanisms addressed in Escape from Freedom and Escape from Evil are evident in the political manifesto and personal testimony of the Norwegian extremist Anders Breivik. Breivik was responsible for killing 77 people in two separate attacks in Norway on 22 July 2011. For the first attack, he left a bomb in a van that had been parked outside Regjeringskvartalet, the Government quarter in the capital Oslo. This attack killed eight and critically injured ten people. While horrific images of the scene were being shown throughout the world, Breivik was on a boat to the island Utøya, where the Workers’ Youth League were holding their annual summer camp (Knausgaard 2016). Claiming to be a police officer, Breivik had

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phoned ahead and explained he was visiting the island to reassure those at the summer camp about the Olso bombings. Wearing a police uniform he bought over the Internet, Breivik brutally and singlehandedly shot and killed 67 people. One teenager fell off a cliff trying to escape and another teenager drowned. A total of 69 people were killed (Pidd 2012). Breivik showed no remorse concerning his actions and blamed the Norwegian Labour party for promoting and imposing multiculturalism on Norway (Palermo 2012). In his 1500 page manifesto, Breivik claimed he was fighting against Muslims, mass immigration and multiculturalism. As I have shown, Fromm’s existential-psychoanalytic theory provides valuable insights into the psychological attractions of both domination and submission. By submitting himself to an extremist right-wing ideology, Breivik sacrificed his freedom in return for a firm sense of identity and purpose. At the same time he felt superior to those he killed and believed his attacks were ‘preemptive to protect Norway’ and that he ‘acted to defend his country’ (Palermo 2012: 2). Becker’s theoretical lens is also helpful. Breivik explained to an Oslo court that his ‘actions were motivated by goodness not evil’ (Palermo 2012: 2). He viewed his own actions as heroic. He also described members of the National Socialist Underground who killed nine immigrants and one policewoman in Germany as ‘heroic young people’, who had made important sacrifices for the ‘conservative revolution’ (Pidd 2012: 4). Breivik’s aim was to kill a whole generation of future liberal politicians. As Wilson opined, these murders should not be understood as the actions of a deranged and out of control gunman. Wilson made the following comments concerning Breivik’s second attack on the island Utøya: This man was making a point that was very clearly thought through. [He] had a uniform—he was dressed as a policeman—he had planned well enough to have weapons and ammunition that he was going to shoot for two hours; he spoke to the kids saying, ‘Gather round, I want to ask you some questions,’ and then shot them and, crucially, he did not take his own life. This is somebody who is not ashamed of what he did. This man was making a point (Wilson cited in Doward 2011: 1).

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Breivik firmly believed his actions were necessary to protect Norway from social and economic collapse. He intended to make a difference, to stand out and achieve what Becker describes as a heroic selfidentity. The devastating consequences of pursuing his idealistic goals are clear. His desire to fight multiculturalism and ‘protect’ Norway led to the worst atrocity in Norway since the Second World War (Knausgaard 2016). Breivik’s own testimony in court together with his manifesto suggests he has a positive and heroic image of himself. This initially seems to challenge much of the research literature on violence and self-esteem. Research on sibling violence (Wiehe 1991), abusive mothers (Oates and Forrest 1985) and hate crime (Levin and McDevitt 1993) have all asserted how low self-esteem can lead to dangerous, aggressive and violent behaviour. Self-esteem is certainly vital for achieving a secure sense of well-being. As Becker argued, ‘to lose self-esteem is to lose the nourishment for a whole, pulsating, organismic life’ (1971: 76). Fromm’s mechanisms of escape describe the ways people attempt to escape their existential vulnerability by searching for a secure and meaningful selfidentity. Becker also explains how people defend against feelings of insecurity and meaninglessness. The strategies identified by Fromm and Becker allow people to live their life with a heightened sense of selfesteem and yet their work also documents the devastating consequences that can result from these defensive strategies. Challenging much of the previous research on the connection between low self-esteem and violence, Baumeister (1999) has emphasised the relationship that exists between high self-esteem and destructive behaviour (also see Baumeister et al. 1996). Contrary to much of the research literature, Baumeister argues that ‘violent people tend to have highly favourable opinions of themselves’ (1999: 135). Rather than identifying with feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness, aggressive and dangerous people are often arrogant, conceited and ‘often consumed with thoughts about how they were superior to everyone else’ (1999: 136). Using the concept of threatened egoism, Baumeister suggests that it is the combination of having a positive self-image with attempts that challenge and undermine this positive image that should be seen as the principle cause of violence. Whilst Baumeister

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is right to draw attention to the connection between high self-esteem and violence, Fromm and Becker claim that people are unconsciously motivated by deep feelings of insecurity and meaninglessness. This challenges Baumeister’s assertion that the connection between low selfesteem and violence is false (see Baumeister 1999). Indeed, even those who believe they have high self-worth may be simply compensating for feelings of vulnerability (Staub 1999). Fromm insisted that ‘symbiosis can alleviate the suffering for a time but it does not eliminate it’ (1969: 237) and Becker showed how people who live with the most meaningful and secure world views still have repressed death anxiety that is projected on ‘filthy’, ‘dangerous’ or ‘lazy’ others. As Staub has argued, it is feelings of weakness and insecurity together with feelings of superiority and arrogance that are likely to cause extreme forms of violence and suffering (Staub 1999).

Conclusion Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and Becker’s Escape from Evil identify the terrible problems that can accompany the search for security, purpose and meaning. Their theoretical accounts directly address the psychic need people have to exclude and censure, and provides important insights into the existential motives that can lead to extreme forms of inhumanity. Fromm emphasised how the need for a firm sense of security and belonging is often accompanied by intolerance, hostility and violence. In modern societies, individuals can escape existential doubt by submitting their individuality to someone or something they understand to be overwhelmingly powerful. Yet this form of submission also brings feelings of superiority towards those who do not share their identity. Whereas Fromm’s analysis highlighted the relevance of social factors for understanding the need people have to escape their individuality, Becker’s work focused on the universal problem human beings in all societies have to live with. His work shows how extreme forms of tyranny, violence and destructiveness arise out of the heroic strategies people use to cope with their mortality awareness. Humans are unusual animals as they have to live with the knowledge of their own mortality.

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To cope with this awareness, humans build defences to ensure they can still live with a sense of meaning and security. Becker claimed that our need for feelings of heroism has caused a great deal of suffering, intolerance, violence and evil. The heroic desire to make an enduring contribution to human life has served to justify the most extreme forms of human cruelty. Whilst Fromm describes how individuals can attempt to alleviate self-uncertainty, he is also clear that the psychological relief provided by these new secondary bonds ‘do not constitute real union with the world’ (1969: 236). Symbiosis can only alleviate rather than eliminate feelings of isolation and aloneness as ‘they leave unchanged the conditions that necessitate the neurotic solution’ (1969: 237). Fromm was always optimistic about the possibility of living in a society that encouraged the full realisation of emotional and intellectual capabilities. Rather than surrendering independence and self-integrity, he maintained the possibility of developing a ‘positive freedom’ where individuals’ can relate themselves ‘spontaneously to the world in love and work’ (1969: 139). Fromm believed human destructiveness to be the result of social, political and economic conditions that value economic wealth and material gain over human solidarity. People resort to violent and self-destructive mechanisms of escape when their needs for security and human connection are restricted. A new form of society is only possible ‘if the old motivations of profit, power and intellect’ are exchanged for ‘being, sharing and understanding’ (2007: 163). Without such changes human beings will continue to escape overwhelming feelings of doubt and isolation by surrendering their individuality. As Fromm shows, this is not a solution that leads to happiness, personal growth or positive freedom. Despite focusing his analysis on the darkest aspects of human existence, Becker also suggested possibilities for living a less destructive life. Becker is highlighting the urgent need to identify and reflect on how we achieve a sense of security, meaning and self-esteem. By understanding what motivates people to ‘act the way they do’ (Becker 1971: vii) he hoped to encourage a critical dialogue concerning the possibilities of living in a more humane world. Instead of unreflexively gaining feelings of heroism by ‘narcissistic scapegoating’, once people can fully understand their need for cosmic heroism it may be possible to find more creative,

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dignified and life-affirming ways to feel heroic. This could be achieved by developing an ‘objective hatred’ in a ‘nondestructive yet victorious social system’ (1975: 126). A victorious social system does not necessarily require a human enemy. Becker argued that a hate object ‘could be things that take impersonal but real forms, like poverty, disease, oppression, natural disasters, etc’ (1975: 145). People could then make an intelligent and rational contribution to improving human life without the thoughtless and self-defeating heroics that are responsible for so much human misery. People need to pragmatically assess the social consequences of their symbolic immortality formulas and develop ennobling forms of heroism that have the potential to enhance the quality of human life. Becker hoped that speculating about life-enhancing victorious social systems would ‘introduce just that minute measure of reason to balance destruction’ (1975: 170). Becker’s suggestions concerning the possibility of developing nondestructive immortality projects was certainly one of the most underdeveloped areas of his theoretical work (Lippens 2015). Becker was directly influenced by Fromm, and it is possible to find references to Fromm throughout his work, but Becker eventually lost faith in Fromm’s optimism: The following quotation is taken from an interview with Becker shortly before his death in 1974: I was once a great admirer of Erich Fromm, but lately I believe he is too facile and too optimistic about the possibilities of freedom and the possibilities of what human life can achieve. I feel there may be an entirely different drama going on in this planet than the one we think we see. For many years, I felt like Fromm and almost everybody else, that the planet was the stage for the future apotheosis of man…I strongly suspect that it may not be possible for mankind to achieve very much on this planet (2005: 228–229).

Becker’s hopeful suggestions concerning less destructive immortality projects seem to have been replaced by a rather pessimistic assessment concerning the plight of humanity. Throughout his work Fromm wrote about totalitarianism, alienation, violence and cruelty, but he always believed more humane alternatives were possible. Indeed, the unique

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form of reason and self-awareness that human beings possess implies that it is always possible to act differently and change our circumstances. In Fromm’s words: Man, while like all other creatures subject to forces which determine him, is the only creature endowed with reason, the only being who is capable of understanding the very forces which he is subjected to and who by his understanding can take an active part in his own fate and strengthen those elements which strive for the good…We are therefore not helpless victims of circumstance; we are, indeed, able to change and to influence forces inside and outside ourselves and to control, at least to some extent, the conditions which play upon us. We can foster and enhance those conditions which develop the striving for good and bring about its realization (1949: 233).

Fromm remained hopeful because the propensity for either good or evil is not preordained. After all, the point of studying the most ‘unreasonable desires and practices we have inside us or see around us’ (Sumner 1997: 2) is so ‘we can do something to create a world with less misery’ (Glover 2001: 7). Learning about the motives that cause so much cruelty, violence and destruction can only enhance the possibility of understanding and reducing conflict. Despite his research into the most traumatic human experiences, Lifton also retains a spirit of hope. Lifton carried out research into the most exceptionally dark practices of violence and mass murder including Hiroshima (1967), the Vietnam War (1973) and Nazi Doctors (2000). His research stares directly into the abyss, but he has always looked ‘into the abyss in order to see beyond it’ (Lifton 1999a: 344). He notes the importance of not being ‘defeated’, ‘deadened’ or ‘incapacitated’ by the abyss (Lifton 1999b). Researchers need to look both into and beyond the abyss to be aware of future possibilities. As Sumner suggests, focusing attention on the darkest aspects of human existence ‘soon reveals that the unthinkable is often more thinkable than we assumed’ (Sumner 1997: 2). Acknowledgements   I would like to thank Tony Amatrudo for inviting me to write a chapter for this collection and Luke Martell for providing useful comments on an earlier draft on this chapter.

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Katz, J. (1988). The seductions of crime: Moral and sensual attractions in doing evil. New York: Basic Books. Knausgaard, K. O. (2016, July 22). Inside the warped mind of Anders Breivik. The Telegraph, Retrieved August 17, 2016, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2016/07/22/anders-breivik-inside-the-warped-mind-of-a-mass-killer/. Levin, J., & McDevitt, J. (1993). Hate crimes: The rising tide of bigotry and bloodshed. New York: Plenum. Lickel, B., et al. (2000). Varieties of groups and the perception of group entitativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 223–246. Lifton, R. J. (1967). Death in life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lifton, R. J. (1973). Home from the war. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lifton, R. J. (1999a). Destroying the world to save it. New York: Holt Paperbacks. Lifton, R. J. (1999b). Evil, the self, and survival: Conversation with Robert Jay Lifton, University of California. Retrieved September 5, 2016, from http:// globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Lifton/lifton-con0.html. Lifton, R. J. (2000). The Nazi doctors: Medical killing and the psychology of genocide. New York: Basic Books. Lippens, R. (2009). A very short, fairly reasonably cheap book about studying criminology. London: Sage. Lippens, R. (2015). Escape from Evil? Notes on Capacity, Tragedy, Coding and Non-Destructive Immortality Projects. Oñati Socio-Legal Series, 5(3), 862–873. Lyng, S. (1990). Edgework: A social psychological analysis of voluntary risktaking. American Journal of Sociology, 95(4), 851–886. Lyng, S. (1993). Dysfunctional risk taking: Criminal behaviour as edgework. In N. J. Bell & R. W. Bell (Eds.), Adolescent risk taking. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Lyng, S. (2004). Crime, edgework and corporeal transaction. Theoretical Criminology, 8(3), 359–375. Lyng, S., Matthews, R., & Miller, W. J. (2009). Existentialism, edgework, and the contingent body: Exploring the criminological implications of ultimate fighting. In R. Lippens & D. Crewe (Eds.), Existentialist criminology. London: Routledge. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man. London: Abacus/Sphere Books. McLaughlin, N. (2014). Escapes from freedom: Political extremism, conspiracy theories, and the sociology of emotions. In L. Chancer & J. Andrews

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(Eds.), The unhappy divorce of sociology and psychoanalysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Malley, P., & Mugford, S. (1994). Crime, excitement and modernity. In G. Barak (Ed.), Varieties of criminology. Westport, CT: Praegar. Oates, R. K., & Forrest, D. (1985). Self-esteem and early background of abusive mothers. Child Abuse and Neglect, 9, 89–93. Palermo, L. (2012, April 17). Killer Anders Breivik: Why I did it—and would do so again. The Week, Retrieved August 14, 2016, from http://www. theweek.co.uk/crime/breivik-massacre/46668/killer-anders-breivik-why-idid-it-%E2%80%93-and-would-do-so-again. Pidd, H. (2012, August 24). Anders Behring Breivik spent years training and plotting for massacre. The Guardian, Retrieved August 14, 2016, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/24/anders-behring-breivikprofile-oslo. Raup, E. (1997). The American prison problem, hegemonic crisis, and the censure of inner-city blacks. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Violence, culture and censure. London: Taylor and Francis. Rosenblatt, A., et al. (1989). Evidence for terror management theory 1: The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who violate or uphold cultural values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(4), 681–690. Sen, A. (2006). Identity and violence: The illusion of destiny. New York: Norton. Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (1991). A terror management theory of social behavior: The psychological functions of self-esteem and cultural worldviews. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 24). Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (1998). Tales from the crypt: On the role of death in life. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 33(1), 9–44. Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The worm at the core: On the role of death in life. London: Allen Lane. Staub, E. (1989). The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Staub, E. (1999). The roots of evil: Social conditions, culture, personality, and basic human needs. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 179–192. Staub, E. (2002). The psychology of bystanders, perpetrators, and heroic helpers. In L. S. Newman & R. Erber (Eds.), Understanding genocide: The social psychology of the holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Steiner, J. M. (1980). The SS yesterday and today: A socio-psychological view. In J. Dimsdale (Ed.), Survivors, victims and perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust. Washington, DC: Hemisphere. Sumner, C. (1990). Rethinking deviance. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1997). Introduction: The violence of censure and the censure of violence. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Violence, culture and censure. London: Taylor and Francis. Sumner, C. (2015). Critical realism, overdetermination and social censure. In D. Crewe & R. Lippens (Eds.), What is criminology about? Philosophical reflections. London: Routledge. Valier, C. (1997). On the violence of censure. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Violence, culture and censure. London: Taylor and Francis. Wiehe, V. R. (1991). Perilous rivalry: When siblings become abusive. Lexington, MA: Heath. Young, J. (2007). The vertigo of late modernity. London: Sage.

Author Biography James Hardie-Bick is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sussex. His research interests include social theory, selfidentity, violence and transgression. He has edited (with R. Lippens) Crime, Governance and Existential Predicaments (2011) and a Special Issue on Transcendence and Transgression for the journal Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences (2012). These collections addressed the continuing relevance of existentialism and transcendence in relation to contemporary criminological theory. Recent publications include Sartre on Edgework (2015) and Escaping the Self: Identity, Group Identification and Violence (2016).

War and Peace: Is Militarisation the New Norm? Karen Evans

It is a generally held misconception that advanced democratic countries such as Britain are today governed by the imperatives of welfare rather than warfare (Basham 2013). According to this position, the atrocities committed in the period leading up to and during the Second World War (1939–1945) were met with such widespread revulsion that the popular response was to build a world in which co-operation and mutual understanding would replace international conflict, mistrust and hostility. This ‘post-war world’ (Lea 2016) offered the prospect of a new international political settlement in which censure and division would no longer dominate. In their stead a new layer of organisational structures, networks and legal frameworks were designed to ensure that a human rights perspective drove ongoing international relations. The punitive and retributive treatment of defeated nations which had caused so much political, social and economic damage after the end of the First

K. Evans (*)  University of Liverpool, Liverpool, England e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_10

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World War was to be replaced this time with a more generous rehabilitative model, which sought to include the defeated nations in a progressive social alliance. This more progressive attitude, it has been suggested, was also evident in the commitment of national governments ‘to further economic development and at the same time to secure rising standards in the various dimensions of social life such as education, health and material living standards’ (Thompson 2010: 109). It was this era which Hobsbawm (1994) named ‘the golden age’ where rising living standards and welfarism predominated as an expectation for the general public and reflected in the rhetorics dominating national state politics in the UK. This age was considered as one in which the population of the West lived in relative affluence and peaceful co-existence. Of course the 1960s and 1970s were not, in reality, times of universal peace and the absence of war. The US continued to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, to prosecute their own interests abroad and to support and fund military intervention where their interests were more directly threatened. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union deployed its tanks to quell uprisings, most notably in Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. In addition the ‘permanent arms economy’ (Kidron 1967) ensured continued economic expansion replacing an imperialist project which had formerly been sustained by the use of military force. The threat of war and militarism were also ever-present in the popular imagination. The 1960s and early 1970s was the era of significant anti-war protests most notably seen in the eruption of anger at the engagement of US forces in Vietnam, but it was also a moment during which the movement for peace and for nuclear disarmament gained some momentum as for so many the threat of another global war was considered too horrific to even contemplate. While replete with contradictions and misapprehensions concerning the true nature of the post-war peace, the last half of the twentieth century was nevertheless presented as a triumph of peacemaking over war which allowed unprecedented economic stability and the triumph of progressive political forces.

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Post-War Britain—The Making and Breaking of a Welfare State The post-war period did indeed herald, in Britain at least, a period which can be characterised as one in which there was general acceptance of a model of state welfarism as a driver within both political and popular agendas. While the welfare state was in reality built on a set of paternalistic and regressive principles which repositioned women back into the domestic sphere and placed the expectation of earning a family wage on to the male head of household (Basham 2016), it nevertheless offered systems of universal health care and education as well as the payment of a measure of social security to the unemployed and sick. The Labour party politician, Anthony Crosland (1956) spoke for many when he argued that welfare Keynesianism had ushered in an era of socially conscious capitalism, held in check by a responsible parliament and robust trade unionism which held the interests of citizens and workers respectively at heart. Fast forward to the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is clear that the political and popular agenda has changed considerably. The principles of collective responsibility and the key role of welfare-driven national policies designed to protect the vulnerable have been replaced in Britain and across much of Europe with a different set of normative orientations and expectations which question the sustainability of the welfare model and which have re-introduced the concept of the ‘undeserving poor’ (Svallfors 2012). The move to the individual responsibilisation of vulnerable populations has not garnered universal public approval (with as Svallfors demonstrates, support for welfarism still apparent in many social democracies across Europe) but attitudes in Britain have certainly hardened against the model of government as provider and Britons are currently more likely to express negative attitudes towards the recipients of welfare than any time since the early 1990s (NatCen 2012). The change in the general public’s attitude towards welfare spending and its recipients demonstrates a shift in the country’s ‘moral economy’ which as Svallfors (2012: 11) argues, is shaped in part by public policies and political institutions as well as the general social environment which is pervasive during any particular period. This chapter will trace

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the shift in attitudes within British society which, it will be argued, have moved from an overarching framework which in the post-war period celebrated a move to peaceful co-existence and welfarism, towards one where the language of division and exclusion has become much more prevalent. It argues that the lens of welfarism has been replaced by a framework which is more akin to that of militarism—understood here as the tendency to elevate military values over other concerns of the state. This tendency will be revealed in the discourses of prominent politicians, in the language of policy and public institutions and in a resurgence of interest in military matters in educational and cultural outputs. While it does not go so far as to argue that the state itself has become more militarised in its political direction or in its particular make-up, it argues that nevertheless, prominent politicians have been able to capitalise on constant war, the fears associated with global terrorism and the popular emotional appeal of and support for ‘our boys’ in the military to help to fashion and to consolidate a shift in the national moral economy in order to undermine both the language and the attitudes associated with tolerance, collectivity and social responsibility. In their stead, a harsher moral discourse has been fostered which is concerned with differentiation and marked by distrust. This replacement discourse serves the needs of a neo-liberal state under intense economic and political pressure. In so shifting the national moral compass, it will be argued, the censure of violent action and reaction which previously characterised progressive liberalism has been replaced with the social censure of pacification and the promotion of a ‘muscular liberalism’ (Cameron 2011) which affords little space for displays of understanding and tolerance of different value systems. The consequences of this shift have been significant, have brought the politics of division and exclusion to the foreground, opened up the spaces in which discriminatory discourses and action are considered acceptable and may be more terrible still in their future impact.

Celebrating Peace and the Censure of Violence The heyday of welfare capitalism in Britain was in part born out of the terrible experiences of war in the first half of the twentieth century. Soldiers returning from war after 1945 as well as those citizens who had

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sustained the war effort on the home front, demanded state recognition and reward for their sacrifice and many were vocal in demanding that national resources were redirected away from militarism towards building a new kind of peace. These demands were not isolated to the British context. All those countries which had been on the frontline of the fighting and suffered significant destruction as a consequence had to develop national strategies to rebuild both their social and physical infrastructures. National governments were forced to recognise the needs of their war veterans and civilian populations in peace as much as they had proved able in war or face a popular backlash. The postwar period was consequently a time of unprecedented state involvement in the provision of a supportive social fabric. In Britain, this change in emphasis culminated in unprecedented and direct state intervention in industry, housing markets and in the provision of welfare and health services to ensure that the country was ‘fit for heroes’. Indeed the war economy had unleashed productive forces which could usher in a period of economic boom, boosting national tax-bases and providing the resources which could be used to support higher levels of social expenditure. As Sumner reminded us ‘The economic basis of middle-class society had been launched. After the war was over, cars, college education, good housing, medical care and regular work were to become the norm for many’ (1994: 142). On both sides of the Atlantic, social commentators spread the message that a new era of capitalism had been attained in which social and technological progress would continue unabated and the advantages of capitalism could be harnessed for the benefit of all. This belief was sustained despite the return of cycles of economic boom and bust from the 1970s which brought unemployment and economic misery to those affected by industrial and economic collapse. It was the refrain which underpinned the rise of Thatcherism despite further economic instability and deindustrialisation through the 1980s. It gained further strength after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the embrace of free market capitalism by the countries of the former communist bloc after 1990, with the US writer Francis Fukuyama (1992) famously heralding the end of history and the triumph of liberal capitalism. It was also a position returned to by New Labour from 1997, typified by the speeches of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, who repeatedly declared that his

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fiscal responsibility had stabilised Britain’s economy and put an end to the boom and bust economic cycles which had plagued it in the past (Summers 2008). The 1939–1945 war also helped bring about profound changes in social attitudes which formed into more progressive politics and policies but on the back of considerable ongoing political struggle. Women, who had readily taken up positions of authority and responsibility during the war in the absence of much of the male population of fighting age, were not going to meekly return to domesticity in the post-war period. Neither was Black America prepared to accept pre-war levels of segregation and exclusion after they had played such an essential part in sustaining the war effort on the battlefield and beyond. Across the globe, the rhetorics of freedom and liberty which had been used to justify so much slaughter were taken up as popular refrains. The immediate post-war political settlement grew increasingly fragile as anti-imperialist and liberation forces gained in confidence and strength and colonised populations demanded the extension of democratic self-governance in their own countries and across the globe many marginalised social groups began to demand a recognition of and an extension to their civil rights. To what extent these groups achieved their goals is a moot point, however, the explosion of social activism and the seismic changes which resulted meant that progressive social forces did gain in prominence in this period. The 1960s and 1970s were witness to the rise of social movements which raised issues of sex discrimination, gay liberation, black power and a politics which stressed agendas of equality and the celebration of difference and diversity. While the Cold War permanent arms economy and military–industrial complex continued to fuel much economic growth, socially the politics of peace and justice gained in popularity as did demands for ecological and social responsibility. The rise of these movements did not shatter the male, white, bourgeois hegemony of previous periods but it did make considerable headway in challenging the status quo and in placing the acceptance of alternative life-choices firmly on the table. This was the period which brought a number of progressive policy directions further up the political agenda with legislation and policies designed to promote equal opportunities, multiculturalism, gender mainstreaming, anti-discriminatory practice

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and human rights to name but a few. It was a period too in which old, tired distinctions of sex, sexuality, physical and mental ability, race and so forth were opened up to discussion and found to be wanting. These movements even extended into the military sphere with the inclusion of openly gay, lesbian, transgender personnel and women into all services and roles within the armed forces eventually completed in the UK in 2016. From the vantage point of 2016, the decades immediately following the Second World War appear more like a progressive moment in history than heralding a permanent feature of the ‘civilising process’ (Elias 1969, 1982). There have been multiple attempts to close down the debates and discussions which were generated at this time and to reverse these policy directions with some successes (see Dragiewicz 2011 for a detailed analysis of anti-feminist backlash in the United States, for example). The picture is complex and contradictory for at the same time the social landscape has been transformed by these movements, with the introduction of same-sex marriage as one significant example in which centuries of discriminatory practice have been dramatically overturned in a number of regions of the globe within a relatively short time period. The censure and criminalisation of many different lifestyles has been reversed even as there is a growing clamour from the conservative right to question the precepts of positive discrimination, multi-culturalism and the further extension of human rights. This decriminalisation agenda helped to build a progressive criminology with many fundamental challenges to mainstream criminology which first emerged in the 1960s, such as labelling theory and the problematisation of the concept of crime, now largely accepted into public understanding. In recent years criminology has opened up to many further areas of critical engagement; in the study of social harm, queer criminology, green criminology and to a focus on reparative practices and peace-making which turn to older, pre-capitalist forms of social justice as offering alternative and more sophisticated forms of understanding and action. A critical space has been opened up in many areas of study and practice which will not be easily shut down, yet it is also necessary to take seriously all those spaces where backlash politics have gained some ascendancy, where established forms of privilege are reasserting their rights to power and dominance and to consider

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the future prospects for the resurgence of more regressive forms of social order as a consequence. The following sections of this chapter look at one aspect of this regressive turn and consider what could be interpreted as the reassertion of military values and perspectives in the UK in recent decades.

Learning to Live with the Military—Again In the years after the Second World War, the military was kept largely separate from civil society, and soldiers were ensconced within a total institution with physical and social barriers firmly in place. There was, as a consequence, little cross fertilisation of ideas and values between military and civil society which were to all intents and purposes, separate social spheres. The wall between military and civil society began to look less impenetrable during the brief, yet politically significant, Falklands/Malvinas War of 1982. This was a war with a popular focus, indeed it has been argued that Margaret Thatcher used this conflict as an opportunity for the deployment of a propaganda machine which was used to her political advantage (Jenkins 2013). The framing of this war in media and political discourse served not only to gain popular support for the gathering of a Task Force to fight for the return of the islands to British sovereignty but also to garner support for Thatcher herself at a time when her popularity was on the wane. The British success in that conflict has been held partly responsible for Thatcher’s subsequent re-election in 1983 and for engendering a period of ‘collective effervescence’ (Ruggiero 2014: 22) and national pride—what we might now term ‘making Britain great again’. Individual soldiers such as Simon Weston, wounded and disfigured in battle, were celebrated in the media and afforded the status of national heroes. In 1986, with Thatcher’s popularity once more in question the Falklands’ moment was tapped into again through the staging of a media photo shoot where Thatcher appeared at the helm of a Challenger tank (Wordpress 2009) cast as the popular hero. It was only 4 years after the Challenger photo opportunity that in 1990 the spectacle of war exploded into view once more—but this time

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as a military intervention which involved more powerful enemies and allies. The first Gulf War was portrayed as a just conflict waged to protect a little country from a much larger and well-armed nation with expansionist intentions and popular support for this military activity was framed through this lens. The media’s portrayal of this military intervention was more immediate than ever before with Operation Desert Storm played out on television screens in live news broadcasts from the front lines. As real-time viewers, civilians were implicated in this military action in ways which could not previously have been realised. Although this first campaign was short—lasting only 5 months in total—and led to the rapid resumption of ‘peace’ (however shaky and unstable in reality) it rendered civilians all the more closely connected to the reality of war and its prosecution. During the subsequent Gulf War of 2003, this public display of military might was extended through the further use of embedded journalists who framed the military action through the eyes of the soldiers on the ground, both physically and ideologically. These media reports demonstrated a distinct lack of critical awareness, as journalists who were more used to reporting from within civil society were caught up in the terrible process of war, inevitably bonding with the soldiers with whom they lived and socialised and repeating a perspective and understanding which was shared by the coalition forces on the ground (Kumar 2006). This public exposure to the scene of war has resulted in the normalisation of the discourses and demeanour of military action which have subsequently seeped into everyday parlance. The boundaries which formerly separated civilian from military realities have continued to be breached subsequently. Like the simulation of war offered by a proliferation of first-person perspective war games enjoyed by many, battlefronts both real and imagined now extend into our living rooms and, with personal handheld mobile media devices can be present in all the different spaces of our lives (Kirton 2016; Mair et al. 2016). The sociology of the early twentieth century considered there to be ‘a fundamental antithesis between military civilization and the civilization of labour, between the spirit of conquest and the spirit of industry’ Ruggiero (2014: 23) yet the events played out in its latter decades suggest that there is no longer a contradiction in the co-existence of both

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states simultaneously. This co-presence shows us that the needs of capitalism can be very well serviced through the vast profits made by the military–industrial complex and further that moving into a war setting does not have to be at the expense of the destruction of civilian life as it was in the past. War and military intervention take place on an almost constant basis today without resultant privations in civil society relating to the scarcity of domestic goods, the separation of families and disruption to daily life. We have learned, in a sense, to live with, and utilise war to our everyday advantage. As we see the violent acts of war performed, seemingly to our own future advantage and without negative consequences, civil society can become more tolerant of the actions and values associated with military interventions. This incursion of the language and practices of militarisation into everyday life continues to shape the mundane spaces in which we are all engaged and to affect our relationships to those with whom we share these everyday spaces.

Militarisation of the Every Day—Constructing the Enemy Within If Thatcher began the process of familiarisation with the language of war and the values of militarisation she also brought another phrase to public attention—‘the enemy within’. In Britain, Thatcher notoriously employed this phrase against members of the National Union of Mineworkers who participated in what eventually proved to be an unsuccessful 12-month battle to keep the country’s coal mines open and productive. Hers was a highly emotive and political use of language which presented the actions and motivations of ordinary workers on strike as antithetical to the values and interests of the British state. The language and the divisive sentiments employed in this instance have been deployed many times since, notably by the conservative right in the USA to justify attacks on ‘liberal values’ said to be destroying the fabric of US society (Savage 2003). War needs its enemies but they are framed through ideologies of justice, humanity and civilisation so that the subjugation of the enemy is

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considered a positive act. Significant in the reordering of society into enemies and allies, is the promotion of ideas of division and difference which allow discourses of ‘us and them’ to predominate but which also presents these divisions as necessary elements to ensure safety and security for the majority (Barberet 2014). Central to this successful separation of ‘us’ from ‘them’ is to invoke and manipulate a range of divisive emotional reactions which help to create an environment in which this separation is justified. Prominent in this project is the political use of the emotions of disgust and fear (Hancock 2004). To invoke disgust against a particular individual or entire social group can be particularly effective in ensuring that others recoil from contact with ‘them’. The continued ignorance of those who are framed as ‘others’ is thereby sustained and helps break any feelings of empathy or solidarity which might otherwise be elicited towards the marginalised group. Individuals who feel disgust towards others are also susceptible to believing that group is harmful to themselves and to society more generally. The consequence of negative differentiation is to create divisions which lead to the easy implementation of strategies of alienation and segregation and the creation of a moral opposition and manoeuvring of power against those who are considered as the ‘enemy’ whether internal or external to the dominant group or nation. These constructed enemies are objectified and dehumanised and the use of force against them normalised and justified (Ruggiero 2014). Such strategies have always been implemented in periods of conflict, in the period leading up to and during the prosecution of wars against external others, however, in the current period an enemy is also located within. Conflicts are no longer contingent on territorial or ideological expansion but the crises we encounter are fought on familiar ground and ‘for financial and economic reasons, wars of information, of custom duties, of control over fluxes of illegal substances, for trading immigrants, and symbolic wars of identity’ (Galli et al. 2009:215). They are wars which are multi-causal and they pervade all aspects of social relations with the result that social institutions which are firmly part of civil society can become imbued with similar, if not identical, militarised values. Conflict, disagreement and behaviour considered problematic are consequently conceived of as

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representing perspectives which are not only oppositional to commonly held values but additionally are dangerous to social cohesion (Hudson et al. 2007). Such infringements are correspondingly dealt with through harsh and decisive action designed to quell certain ideas and behaviours and to send a message to others that they have been deemed unacceptable. The blurring of boundaries between internal and external enemies has impacted on the practices of the civil institutions of the state and allowed these to become more coercive in their practices. Their coercive actions can be justified as used legitimately and as part of the social contract by which citizens give up some of their freedoms for the greater good. During the period of liberal welfarism significant trust was given to the institutions of the state which retained ‘force’ in the hands of the military, police and penal institutions but which largely eschewed coercive powers within its welfare arm but coercive practices have now crept into a range of areas where the state delivers socially necessary services. This creep of coercion and force can be identified in the provision of social housing where acceptable behaviour contracts are enforced; in the removal of benefits from the unemployed who can be heavily sanctioned for not conforming to strict requirements which ensure their availability for work; in forcing the sick to undergo ongoing and intrusive tests to prove their entitlement to support; and in the policing of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees who are increasingly liable to detention and forced deportation if suspected of breaking stringent immigration laws. However, it is not only the state which has legitimate access to the use of coercion and force against the civilian population. Increasing privatisation of police duties and the provision of government contracts to private security companies such as G4S in prisons and in maintaining security in semi-public/private spaces and public places has meant that an increasing number of non-state actors are charged with hard policing functions. In addition, public sector workers, previously perceived as part of the ‘softer’ state functions of social support and welfare provision are required to behave in ever more coercive ways, rationing what are seen as scarce resources and making decisions about who qualifies as deserving of support (Campbell and Davidson 2009).

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In contrast to the limited availability of funding for welfare, housing and health, the state’s resources rarely appear so scarce that they cannot be diverted to military support wherever intervention is considered as politically justified. As Basham (2013: 25) reveals, the financing of the army in Britain (while hit by austerity measures in recent years) remains a significant priority. The UK has the fourth largest military budget of any country, behind the US, China and Russia, and continues to uphold the NATO defence expenditure target of 2% of GDP. At the end of the Cold War, governments across Europe were encouraged to deliver a ‘peace dividend’ which would see state expenditure directed away from defence and toward the shoring up of social institutions across the continent—as proof, as it were, that liberal capitalism could maintain a level of quality of life which was beyond the limits of communism. Defence Reviews in 1990 and 1994 suggested that Britain had also signed up to this concept and would continue along this path (Basham 2016). The economic crisis of 2008 and the defeat of Labour in the 2010 election, however, put paid to this commitment as the ideology of austerity gained political ascendancy. As available resources were increasingly diverted away from the provision of social support it was necessary that the state embrace a different set of organisational values, to fashion itself as the protector rather than the provider and to redesignate its orientation as the purveyor of security rather than of care and compassion and the security agenda became the lens through which services were delivered (Lea and Stenson 2007).

Militarisation and Social Control The ‘securitisation’ of anti-crime measures of which Lea and Stenson (2007) have written has seen the introduction and normalisation of various ‘pre-crime’ interventions. It has also seen the construction of an architecture of surveillance which threatens the privacy of the civilian population but which is justified in terms of national and individual security and as responding to the risks associated with increased terrorist activity taking place on British soil. Lea (2015) identifies the introduction of pre-crime and surveillance measures as representing a

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‘militarisation of criminal justice’ which is characterised by techniques of profiling and the gathering of intelligence against groups and individuals calculated as posing a risk to security, together with a ‘pre-emptive neutralisation’ of those considered a threat. Lea observes in these moves a ‘trickle-down and contamination effect’ (Lea 2015: 203–204) which begins to impact on the entire criminal justice system, shaping its responses to any individuals identified as, or suspected of, being engaged in any type of serious crime. Lea argues that convergence in the agendas of security and criminal justice is strongly associated with the fears engendered in a post 9/11 global social order. It is worth casting our mind back, however, to the direction of travel prior to 2001— an exercise which reveals that the picture is more complex even than that which Lea portrays and which reveals that the current orientation of criminal justice can be detected in the adoption of various criminal justice principles and practices which pre-date post 9/11 anxieties. Present-day attitudes to crime, policing and the practice of criminal justice have their roots in the elevation of fear as a guiding principle in policy and political strategy which emerged in 1960s’ United States. President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice which reported in 1965 set up a wave of concern around crime which swept across the developed world in subsequent decades and had a notable impact in crime prevention discourses and policies enacted by British governments. The adoption of a neoliberalist perspective in economic and social interventions by successive governments from Thatcher onwards subsequently cemented a particular conception of crime control in the public and political imagination in which the promotion of ‘law and order’ agendas was afforded a more significant role than those of welfare and in which ‘privatised prudentialism’ (O’Malley 1992) replaced systems of socialised risk management. Crime fears dominated political campaigning and policy direction in the 1980s and 1990s with government funds diverted towards embedding crime control measures into the physical and social fabric. A hard-edged political rhetoric designed to cast particular groups as problematic and dangerous was employed, not only against those suspected of criminality, but also against the poor, the ‘dysfunctional’ and the socially disruptive. The unemployed, the poor and the young were

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demonised as feckless, lacking motivation and individually responsible for their own situation. This blaming and responsibilisation of the individual was noted before the start of the new millennium (Garland 2001). The techniques and tools of ‘urban militarism’ were apparent over 20 years ago when the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, announced the CCTV Challenge Competition Fund (BBC 2015). Precrime interventions were first instigated by New Labour in the form of anti-social behaviour, curfew and control orders, hailed as their flagship policies immediately after taking office in 1997 (Evans 2011). As early as 2001 Flusty wrote that such interventions had become subject to a ‘process of naturalisation’ which had firmly embedded them in the eyes of the general public as a necessary social good (Flusty 2001:660). Governments have long used the discourses of war and military language to address what they perceive to be problem behaviour and in their policing of ‘suspect communities’ (Hillyard 1993). The Johnson administration first coined the term ‘war on crime’, it was co-opted by Reagan in the ‘war on drugs’ and by the first Bush presidency through the ‘war on terror’. As well as their vocabulary, however, the means of war and the employment of militarised crime control measures have also been absorbed into the civilian policing repertoire. Crowd control measures which were normalised in Northern Ireland in the 1970s were utilised on the streets of mainland Britain by the 1980s to ‘pacify’ discontented youth angered by racism, over-surveillance and unemployment (Lea and Young 1993), tasers are employed in Britain with increasing regularity (Home Office 2015) and in 2016 the London Metropolitan Police were even using the term ‘total war’ to express their current policing strategy (Metropolitan Police 2016). The problem of street crime and disorder has been used for many decades to justify an intensification of social control and to maintain public support for the police and other institutions of criminal justice (Walklate and McGarry 2015) but in an era of falling rates of recorded crime the problem of ‘terror’ is now utilised in its stead. Fear of terror, which was initially translated as fear of external threat, is now used to justify internal surveillance measures against resident populations. The trope of ‘foreigner’ as enemy has been more readily used to increase support for the politics of nationalism and to underpin a shifting of the boundaries of the nation state. The instigation of border controls now

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takes place inside prisons, detention centres, workplaces and even in the private rented housing sector where the issuing of tenancies to undocumented migrants has been made an illegal act. As the fear of foreign infiltration is increasingly employed as a justification for internal regulatory control, staff within health and public services as well as educational establishments are expected to play their own part in the policing of national borders, in protecting national resources and taking on the responsibility for maintaining national security (Kaufman 2015). The general citizenry too has been co-opted into the security agendas of the state, encouraged to surveil their own version of ‘suspect’ groups and asked to question the motivations of non-nationals and visitors from abroad. Again the beginnings of this shift can be seen in the years which pre-date the ‘war on terror’. In 1994 British citizens were advised to take up a vigilant stance against crime and to become ‘the eyes and ears of the police’ and during the New Labour years (1997–2010) the public was further encouraged to behave as ‘active citizens’ and to work with the police and local state to report ‘antisocial behaviour to the authorities’ (Evans 2011). The Big Society promoted by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition from 2010 extended this policy direction which was then easily turned in the twenty-first century towards the development of the Prevent duty which requests and in some areas of public service, requires a further level of public engagement with the agenda of national state security. Prevent can, therefore, be perceived as an example of Steinert’s ‘populist moment’ used in this instance against an internal ‘enemy population’ (Lea  2015:205) as existing and future citizens are required to demonstrate that they share the values and priorities of the British state.

Militarisation and Popular Culture Despite the constant waging of war, there is still no nationally shared consensus as to the aims and purpose behind recent military interventions. Social attitude surveys conducted in Britain have consistently shown that those wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which were fought post2001 have remained unpopular despite continued attempts at their

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justification by the state. British Social Attitudes surveys also show that popular support for spending on the military as a government priority has not been consistently high but that it has fluctuated, with high points of support for the prioritisation of defence spending in 1983 just after the Falklands War and again in 2011 (with 8 and 10% respectively of those polled in each of those years agreeing that military spending should be a high priority for government). However, the surveys also show support falling to only 3% in both 1993 and 2003 and that in 2012 public support fell slightly again to its 1983 level of 8% of those polled (NatCen 2012). The British state cannot count on sustained public support for its military operations, therefore, and must continually make the case to the British public. One of the ways in which the military has gained a significant profile in the public consciousness and garnered considerable popular support, however, has been through the public spectacle surrounding the repatriation of the remains of soldiers killed in military action (McGarry 2017). This practice only commenced in 1982 following the Falklands/ Malvinas conflict when it was argued that those British soldiers who died in battle could only be properly honoured if they were brought back onto the soil of mainland Britain. This practice of repatriation has since become the norm for all British citizens killed in wars abroad and has changed the way in which we ‘mark the sacrifice of war’ (Walklate et al. 2015: 2). As research reveals, however, public demonstrations of respect for British soldiers and their families did not represent a shift towards support for the decision to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather displays of solidarity are more often a show of empathy to mark the personal tragedy suffered by the soldiers and their immediate families. The political establishment has, nevertheless, sought to capitalise on the public’s widespread demonstration of support for soldiers on the battlefield, if not for the war (Basham 2013). The years building up to the 2010 general election saw a ratcheting up of political engagement in issues surrounding the military which subsequently ‘became a permanent part of cross-party political agendas’ (McGarry 2017: 3) as each party vied to demonstrate their commitment to the troops and to tap into the general structure of feeling surrounding the loss of British lives.

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This increasing political and public support for military personnel and therefore by default the institution of the military, can be demonstrated in a number of ways. Despite ongoing general disapproval of military engagement in the Middle East and revulsion at some of the reported atrocities which coalition forces were responsible for committing, the language of heroic sacrifice has been increasingly applied, not only to the wounded and those killed in action but extended to all serving soldiers. This public support was typified in the setting up in 2007 of the charity ‘Help for Heroes’, which was created to deliver ‘an enduring national network of support for our wounded and their families’ (Help for Heroes 2016). This charity capitalised on growing public concern that the state was failing in its duty of care to soldiers and their families and was enthusiastically supported with Help for Heroes street collections, car stickers and donation boxes appearing with notable regularity (Basham 2013). The charity was successful in bringing political and public attention to the issue of support for individuals affected by the trauma and violence of war. In 2012, British Social Attitudes surveys revealed that nine out of ten Britons polled expressed support for the soldiers deployed into war zones. David Cameron, the then leader of the Conservative opposition, was quick to make political capital out of this increase in concern. In 2008 Cameron set up the Military Covenant Commission to address the problem of ‘the broken covenant’—the government’s deficiency in protecting and providing for soldiers returning from war zones. The Commission and subsequent report Armed Forces Covenant also aimed set out, not only to restore the broken Military Covenant but also to improve relations between civilians and the military and to close the ‘civil-military gap’ (Basham 2013). Basham (2013: 22–23) contends that after the Second World War the civil–military gap was wider in Britain than in any other liberal democracy. The reason given for this continuing divide in civil/military relations were multiple: after the end of conscription Britain retained a relatively small and professionalised standing army; British military personnel were advised to maintain a low profile with the wearing of military uniforms banned in public due to the ongoing threat of terrorism as a consequence of the British military presence in Northern Ireland; and many schools and universities excluded the military from

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their premises for largely political reasons, acknowledging that the public were generally opposed to war and to discriminatory practices which were then rife within military institutions. As a consequence, exposure to the military remained particularly light. Since 2008, however, concerted efforts have been made to reverse this state of affairs. Since 2010, in particular, the government ‘has been advocating and funding military ethos initiatives’ (Basham 2016: 259). These have overseen the reintroduction of military cadet corps in many schools, brought army recruitment back into university campuses and afforded former military personnel a fast track route into gaining qualified teacher status. These initiatives have sought to engender a type of ‘military socialisation’ (Basham 2016: 259) which inculcates military-style values above other ethical perspectives. As a result the values of institutional loyalty delivered through teamwork are married with self-reliance and the disciplined body to foster a regulated, compliant individuality which is fiercely attached to the myth of national interest. The values of empathy, tolerance and consideration for the views of others which formerly underpinned educational principles are consequently rejected, overwhelmed and considered as inadequate tools for bringing up the next generation. As Basham (2016: 261) goes on to observe ‘military ethos initiatives, and their underlying assumptions about the desirability of military service as a social good, normalise the military and its violence in everyday life’. These values are used, she argues, to justify the politics of austerity which also hark back to the ‘blitz spirit’, a time where British citizens learned to cope with scarcity by building a common front and a much-missed social cohesion which could be turned against the enemy invader. Allied to the reintroduction of military values into educational spaces, the cultural milieu in Britain has similarly incorporated a renewed interest in matters military. Televised programmes which follow the perspective of the military have become staple items; programmes such as the Channel 4 offering SAS: Who Dares Wins and Royal Marines Commando School invite the viewer into hitherto hidden aspects of military training. They present harsh disciplinary regimes, the use of bullying tactics, violence, stress and mental torture as necessary steps through which to attain an idealised ‘hegemonic masculinity’

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(Connell 1995) suggesting that this is the pinnacle of (male) human endeavour. The return of the hero is celebrated in the Invictus Games, a military Paralympics-style sports contest for wounded veterans which celebrates the conquering of human frailty by minds which have been trained and disciplined by the techniques developed for war and conquest. The hero-ification of popular culture was even displayed in the summer of 2016 when the celebration of Olympic medal-winners in Manchester and London was cast as a ‘Heroes Parade’. These serve as intensely ideological moments which instil a reification of the military and its values into popular cultural tropes.

Gender ‘Our Boys’ Not ‘Our Girls’ The introduction of hero-ification and militarisation into popular culture has impacts which resonate far beyond the immediate moments in which they surface. Despite recent changes to recruitment practices which have opened up the military to all regardless of gender and sexuality, the military remains a masculinist and male-dominated institution. As Cockburn (2014) has observed militarism needs to cultivate a particular form of masculinity within its forces in order to successfully prosecute the goals of war. It reifies an exaggerated gender order and a particular form of violent masculinity with rejects and negates ideals associated with femininity (Basham 2016). Barberet (2014) has raised important questions concerning the impact of the ascendancy of values associated with militarism on gender relations within society more generally. As she suggests, although war and militarism are different experiences they are intimately related, and militarism as a set of values which shape our understanding of social relations and our interpersonal connections, can be present even in the absence of war. The military masculinity which is considered a vital element of success within the theatre of war can be brutal in its application. It is ordered around the values of action rather than passivity and physical force rather than consent and conciliation. These values associated with militarism also celebrate group loyalties (especially those which are oriented around a shared

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male experience) and its heroes are constructed in the popular imagination as strong, male protectors. These conditions reinforce a hegemonic ideal which feminist and critical studies of masculinity have long sought to problematise and to replace (Connell 1995). The reintroduction of military values into schools is both a gendered and racialised project (Basham 2016). Militarised practices privilege masculinity over femininity and place national over international interests. The recent incursion of the military into educational spaces was specifically designed to provide under-achieving boys with male role models, but by doing so a particular form of violent masculinity is presented to both boys and girls which is unconnected to the development of emotional maturity and empathy. The reinforcing of hegemonic masculine ideals creates an ‘important contextual and normative setting for violence against women’ to be similarly tolerated and normalised (Barberet 2014: 101). Recent research into violence in British society reveals that there is cause of concern in this area (Walby et al. 2016). As research reveals, while there has been a general fall in the numbers of violent crimes recorded since the mid-1990s ‘violent crime against women stops falling in 2008/2009’ (Walby et al. 2016: 23) and many forms of violent crime against women began to increase from that time. Walby’s (2015) analysis implicates the politics of austerity in this violent turn as the withdrawal of public services leaves women and girls more vulnerable to exploitation and financial immiseration. More research is desperately needed on the impact of cultural forces of placing masculinist principles and institutions so much closer to the centre of governance.

Concluding Thoughts War, communal tension, corruption, the dehumanisation of opponents, oppressive gender relations, atrocities and violent reaction to social change have all been considered by the parochial mainstream as the preserve of underdeveloped, postcolonial and post-conflict societies, but as recent work has shown (Whyte 2014, 2015) these are equally integral to the order of what are considered to be ‘developed nations’. It is only

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relatively recently, however, that criminology as an academic discipline has developed a critical lens which is wide enough to see these issues as pertinent to ‘first world’ societies. We have entered a period in which the politics of tolerance, respect and humanity are currently censured as representing weakness, capitulation and delusion. Social regulation and control mechanisms increasingly reflect this new reality and have culminated in an excess of discipline and a rejection of leniency and tolerance. This current period can be traced back for many decades so does not represent a radical departure from what has previously taken place but what has emerged in more recent years represents a noticeable extension of the existing ideological project of the conservative and antiprogressive right. This project has gained considerable public support even as it serves the interests of a powerful elite rather than the majority. It should not be a surprise that in precarious and tumultuous times people submit to a worldview which celebrates a power and authority which promises security and a relief from doubt. During the 1980s Stuart Hall wrote of the emergence of authoritarian populism, embodied in the political perspectives and ideologies which became known as Thatcherism (Hall and Jacques 1983). Over 25 years since her political demise, a political consensus has absorbed many of the ideas which Thatcherism represented those of individual responsibilisation (Garland 2001) and the institutionalisation of intolerance (Muncie) have been particularly significant for critical criminologists. Throughout the period of Thatcher’s premiership and for some time beyond, however, support for welfarism remained strong. However, in order to attempt to resolve the ongoing economic and political crises still faced by capitalism and the state it was necessary to overturn this support and to redefine and reconstruct a vision of the national-popular interest which would allow the state to withdraw successfully from its welfare commitments (Jessop et al. 1984). If the national surveys are to be believed then this position is on the way to being achieved with support instead for an alternative hegemonic project which constructs the national interest in much narrower terms. The replacement discourses owe more to a conflict model which stresses the elements of strength, leadership, coercion and a forceful pursuit of national interest.

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As attitudes which are closer to authoritarian than liberal democratic solutions are increasingly championed by well-known figures from across the political spectrum these can leak into the social fabric, poisoning interpersonal relations and sowing intercommunal tensions within British society as they have wreaked damage internationally. The solution has been to provide more social control and to adopt ever more coercive methods of public order control as tensions sporadically flare up on the streets. War, Lea (2015: 199) reminds us, or at least the industrial-scale conflicts with which war is usually associated, requires a diversion of all social and economic resources to the ‘war effort’. The maintenance of social order in times of war involves the suspension of normal civil liberties for the duration of the conflict with activities perceived as likely to undermine morale likely to be criminalised. Internal opposition quickly and decisively dealt with and nationals and refugees from the enemy state are regarded as ‘risky’ and likely to be incarcerated. Lea is concerned that techniques of social control which are currently employed in the liberal democracies of the West are moving closer to those which are more reminiscent of a war-time context with legal and regulatory changes enacted, especially those focused around anti-terror legislation, which have made fundamental changes to the orientation of criminal justice in Britain. Now more than ever criminology needs to raise the problems inherent in the manipulation of the collective sentiment by powerful elites. It is important that we ensure that our own work has not in some way ‘capitulated to neo-conservatism’ (Zedner 2000) and that we do not fall into a censure of that which we do not understand and that with which we are not familiar. We need to make professional and political alliances which can help to expose and to overcome the politics of division and differentiation. This will mean engaging with ideas with which we might at first feel uneasy and uncomfortable but this is necessary if we are not to fall into the same stereotypical characterisations which have been formulated by those with whom we do not share a political vision. We need to understand the collective fears which underpin expressions of anger and pessimism and which have culminated in the rejection of a liberal consensus which has proved incapable of preventing the slide into a degradation of work, opportunity and life for many.

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References Barberet, R. (2014). Women, crime and criminal justice: A global enquiry. London: Routledge. Basham, V. M. (2013). War, identity and the liberal state. London: Taylor and Francis. Basham, V. M. (2016). “Raising an army”. The geopolitics of militarizing the lives of working-class boys in an age of austerity. International Political Sociology, 10(3), 258–274. BBC. (2015). ‘The end of the CCTV era?’ BBC news online 15th January 2015. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30793614. Cameron, D. (2011). ‘PM’s speech at munich security conference’ gov.uk. Retrieved July 16, 2015, from https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference. Campbell, J., & Davidson, G. (2009). Coercion in the community: A situated approach to the examination of ethical challenges for mental health social workers. Ethics and Social Welfare, 3(3), 249–263. Cockburn, C. (2014). ‘A continuum of violence: Gender, war and peace. In R. Jamieson (Ed.), The criminology of war. Farnham: Ashgate. Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Crosland, A. (1956). The future of socialism. London: Cape. Dragiewicz, M. (2011). Equality with a vengeance: Men’s rights groups, battered women, and antifeminist backlash. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Elias, N. (1969). The civilizing process. The history of manners (Vol. I). Oxford: Blackwell. Elias, N. (1982). The civilizing process. State formation and civilization (Vol. II). Oxford: Blackwell. Evans, K. (2011). Crime prevention. A critical introduction. London: Sage. Flusty, S. (2001). The banality of interdiction: Surveillance, control and the displacement of diversity. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(3), 658–664. Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Galli, C., Minervini, A., & Sitze, A. (2009). On war and the enemy. The New Centennial Review, 9(2), 195–219.

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Garland, D. (2001). The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, S., & Jacques, M. (Eds.). (1983). The politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hancock, A. (2004). The politics of disgust. The public identity of the welfare queen. New York: New York University Press. Help for Heroes. (2016). Homepage help for heroes website. Retrieved December 1, 2016, from http://www.helpforheroes.org.uk/. Hillyard, P. (1993). Suspect community: People’s experiences of the prevention of terrorism acts in Britain. London: Pluto Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1994). The age of extremes. The short twentieth century 1945–1991. London: Michael Joseph. Home Office. (2015). Police use of taser statistics, England and Wales, 2015. London: Home Office. Hudson, M., Philips, J., Ray, K., & Barnes, H. (2007). Social cohesion in diverse communities. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Jenkins, S. (2013, April 9). How Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands gamble paid off. The Guardian. Retrieved November 6, 2016, from https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-falklands-gamble. Jessop, B., Bonnett, K., Bromley, S., & Ling, T. (1984). Authoritarian populism, two nations, and Thatcherism.New Left Review, 1(147), 32–60. Kaufman, E. (2015). Punish and expel. Border control, nationalism and the new purpose of the prison. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kidron, M. (1967). A permanent arms economy. International Socialism, 1(28), 8–12. Kirton, A. (2016). Online engagements: War and social media. In R. McGarry & S. Walklate (Eds.), The palgrave handbook of criminology and war. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Kumar, D. (2006). Media, war and propaganda: Strategies of information management during the Iraq War 2003. Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, 3(1), 48–69. Lea, J. (2015). Postscript: From the criminalisation of war to the militarisation of crime control. In S. Walklate & R. McGarry (Eds.), Criminology and war: Transgressing the borders. London: Routledge. Lea, J. (2016). War, criminal justice and the rebirth of privatisation. In R. McGarry & S. Walklate (Eds.), The palgrave handbook of criminology and war. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

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Lea, J., & Stenson, K. (2007). Security, sovereignty, and non-state governance “From Below”. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 22(2), 9–27. Lea, J., & Young, J. (1993). What is to be done about law and order? Crisis in the nineties. London: Pluto Press. Mair, M., Elsey, C., Smith, P. V., & Watson, P. G. (2016). The violence you were/n’t meant to see: Representations of death in an age of digital reproduction. In R. McGarry & S. Walklate (Eds.). The palgrave handbook of criminology and war. London: Palgrave MacMillan. McGarry, R. (2017). Demystifying the “victimized state” a civil–military crisis in waiting? Illness, Crisis & Loss, 25(1), 63–84. In R. McGarry & S. Walklate (Eds.), The palgrave handbook of criminology and war. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Metropolitan Police. (2016). ‘Total policing’ metropolitan police website. Retrieved August 17, 2016, from http://content.met.police.uk/Site/totalpolicing. NatCen. (2012). British social attitudes 30. Retrieved November 13, 2015, from http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-30/ key-findings/introduction.aspx. O’Malley, P. (1992). Risk, power and crime prevention. Economics and Society, 21(3), 252–275. Ruggiero, V. (2014). War and the death of Achilles. In S. Walklate & R. McGarry (Eds.), Criminology and war. Transgressing the borders. London: Routledge. Savage, M. (2003). The enemy within: Saving America from the liberal assault on our schools, faith, and military. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson. Summers, D. (2008, September 11). No return to boom and bust: What Brown said when he was chancellor. The Guardian. Sumner, C. (1994). The sociology of deviance: An obituary. Buckingham: Open University Press. Svallfors, S. (Ed.). (2012). Contested welfare states: Welfare attitudes in Europe and beyond. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Thompson, W. (2010). Ideologies in the age of extremes, 1914–1919: Liberalism, conservatism, communism, fascism. London: Pluto Press. Walby, S. (2015). Crisis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Walby, S., Towers, J., & Francis, B. (2016). Is violent crime increasing or decreasing? A new methodology to measure repeat attacks making visible the significance of gender and domestic relations. British Journal of Criminology, 56(6), 1203–1234.

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Walklate, S., & McGarry, R. (Eds.). (2015). Criminology and war. Transgressing the borders. London: Routledge. Walklate, S., Mythen, G., & McGarry, R. (2015). “When you see the lipstick kisses …”—Military repatriation, public mourning and the politics of respect. Palgrave Communications, 1(15009), 1–9. Whyte, D. (Ed.). (2014). How violent is Britain? Criminal Justice Matters, 98(1), 3–3. Whyte, D. (Ed.). (2015). How corrupt is Britain? London: Pluto Press. Wordpress. (2009). ‘Thatcher in a tank’ iconic photos. Retrieved December 9, 2016, from https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/thatcher-in-atank/. Zedner, L. (2000). The pursuit of security. In T. Hope & R. Sparks (Eds.). Crime, risk and insecurity. London: Routledge.

Author Biography Karen Evans is Senior Lecturer in the  Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool. Her work has focused, although not exclusively, on communities in excluded neighbourhoods and their responses to marginalisation and deprivation. From the early 1990s, this focus on the urban experience took Karen into research which was more criminological in nature. Karen has published in the following areas: urban transformations, community and cyberspace, crime and community safety, community participation and experiences of victimisation. In recent years, Karen has developed an interest in aspects of gender and crime having coedited a Reader on this subject for Open University Press and having published a number of articles on gender-responsive justice systems. Karen has also written two books which cast a critical eye over crime prevention/community safety theory and policies. Karen is also an active trade unionist and political activist.

What Is Crime, What Is Deviance? Reflections on the Development and Contemporary Relevance of Sumner’s Notion of Social Censure David Moxon

Introduction That there are no universally accepted definitions of the terms ‘crime’ and ‘deviance’ within the field of criminology may surprise those with only a passing acquaintance with it. Instead, those engaged in the criminological endeavour are faced with a wealth of debate over what intuitively seem like straightforwardly ‘common sense’ notions. As Reiner puts it, crime is an ‘essentially contested concept’ (2016: 3), which is “complex and multifaceted, […] condensing a number of partly conflicting, partly overlapping meanings”. Of course, a degree of theoretical eclecticism is undoubtedly healthy in any field of study, but there can be few such fields where the actual nature of the object of inquiry itself is contested as keenly. Indeed, so marked is this trend that one leading text in the discipline is entitled What is criminology? (Bosworth

D. Moxon (*)  Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_11

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and Hoyle 2011) whilst another asks What is criminology about? (Crewe and Lippens 2015). Others even ponder the advantages of a ‘crime free criminology’ (for example, Gottfredson 2011). And despite the lack of accord, the issue is often sidelined or, worse still, simply ignored. The work of Colin Sumner offers a critical and robust solution to this issue. Sumner sees crime and deviance as instances of ‘censure’. The first section of this chapter will provide an outline of the notion of censure, returning to its origins in the debates which flowered during 1970s regarding Marxian criminology, as well as featuring some of Sumner’s more recent work. Then, in the second section, it will be suggested that Sumner’s position, initially elucidated 40 years ago, is increasingly relevant in the fracturing world of late modernity where censoriousness has reached a new pitch and there is a general lack of consensus on what constitutes ‘crime’, ‘deviance’, ‘antisocial behaviour’ and the ‘normal’ and non-criminal. This argument will be made with reference to a single incidence of ‘censure’ prompted by the conviction for rape (later overturned) of the professional footballer Ched Evans. The aim is to show how the conceptual toolkit provided by Sumner continues to illuminate the contemporary landscape of crime and deviance, perhaps now more than ever.

Sumner’s Concept of Censure: An Archaeology1 Over his considerable oeuvre, Sumner has continually developed and refined his argument that crime and deviance are best viewed as instances of censure. Yet for all its various iterations, the enduring kernel of Sumner’s argument can be found in his short chapter ‘Marxism and Deviancy Theory’ which appeared in the 1976 edited collection The Sociology of Crime and Delinquency in Britain (Wiles 1976). Here, Sumner offered a concise initial statement of his basic position in the context of the vigorous Marxian debates on law and crime that were taking place at the time.2 The chapter was intended as a response to Paul Hirst (1975a, b) who, in the course of his own (Althusserian) response to The New Criminology (Taylor et al. 1973), had famously suggested that Marxism had no business in constructing a theory of

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crime and deviance. This was because the concepts of crime and deviance are not objects specified by Marxist theory. Instead they “vanish into the general theoretical concerns […] of Marxism” (Hirst 1975a: 204). Sumner did not wholly reject Hirst’s analysis, but argued that Hirst could have inferred, from his own logic, that Marxism was able to “construct an object of knowledge that could be termed ‘deviance’” (Sumner 1976: 165).3 Such an object would have to be reworked from scratch using the conceptual categories of Marxism in order to circumvent Hirst’s concerns (Sumner 1976, 1994: 302–303). It was to this task that Sumner directed his attention. Hirst himself had suggested both that deviance was constituted by what he called ‘practicosocial ideology’ (Hirst 1975b: 238–239), and that said ideology was one of the core categories of Marxism (Hirst 1975a: 204). On this basis, Sumner utilised the category of ideology in order to construct a Marxian concept of deviance and crime. At the same time, Sumner was busy drawing upon his doctoral studies to develop a theory of ideology that crystallised many of the themes which had emerged within Marxism over the couple of decades prior.4 To the contemporary reader, as well as being expressed in what now feels like a rather archaic Marxist vernacular, much of Reading Ideologies (Sumner 1979) may seem rather obvious and trite. However, at the time, the relation between the ‘base’ and the ‘superstructure’, and ideology’s place within that, was the subject of some fierce debate among Marxists of varying hues. Sumner’s intention was to avoid the difficulties encountered by Marxian work which reduced ideology and other superstructural phenomena to mere ‘reflections’ of the economic base. Sumner drew a much richer notion of ideology, suggesting that “ideologies structure our understanding of the world out there and also exist as constituent and embodied features of that world, determining the way it presents itself to us” (Sumner 1979: 286). He saw what he characterised as ideologies (signs, ideas, impressions, notions) and ideological formations (clusters of signs, or complex systematisations of ideologies) (1979: 20) as imbricated within all levels of the social formation, rather than being the mere by-products of more fundamental processes in the economy or that which deceptively cloaked ‘real’ social relations. This view of ideologies regards them “as both sectional reflections of social

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structure and as active, creative, integral components of reflexive social practice, not simply the systematic, intellectualized, false consciousness of group interest” (Sumner 1990a: 29 (emphasis added)). Indeed, Sumner maintained that “because of their general origin in practice, some ideologies are necessitated by political and cultural relations: ideologies do not just arise out of the economic system. As an element in practice, ideologies are always one of the determinants of its product” (1979: 291). Ultimately, as he put it, “the old notion of ideology as a gaseous effect of the economic structure is inadequate and must be replaced by a conception of ideology as an integral and substantive element of all social practice. In this way, ideology is an active force within all aspects of social development and not just an animal that roams around the ephemeral reserves of the superstructure” (1979: 290). With this notion of ideology underpinning his work, Sumner developed a new definition of crime and deviance. In the first place, for Sumner ‘crime’ and ‘deviance’ are not valid groups. They are “hopelessly inadequate as empirical descriptors of social behaviour” (Sumner 1990a: 26); condemnatory labels “such as militants, muggers, extremists, deviants, criminals, thieves, prostitutes, perverts, nutters, slags, delinquents, bastards, villains, the socially inadequate, freaks, rioters, loonies and scroungers (believe it or not) are not adequate behavioural categories” (Sumner 1990a: 16–17). Indeed, “the search for a general concept [such as crime or deviance] to encompass such widely varying practices, problems and situations was itself logically misguided” (Sumner 1994: 310). Concomitantly, the vast assortment of conduct swallowed up within these broad categories is simply too diverse to be amenable to explanation by single all-encompassing aetiological theories.5 The only traits that all ‘deviant’ or ‘criminal’ actions have in common are that, first, they are purposive behaviours and second, they have been labelled as deviant or criminal. This position represented something of a dialectical transcendence of two of the most influential criminological positions of the early 1970s. On the one hand was symbolic interactionism, particularly the notion of labelling. On the other was the Marxism of The New Criminology. From symbolic interactionism, Sumner took the notion that the essence of ‘crime’ or ‘deviance’ is the label itself. As Becker and others

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had argued, deviance is behaviour defined as such. However, Sumner rejected the implication of ‘passivity’ that this formulation contains. For symbolic interactionists, “deviance was not an objective fact until the individual had internalised the censure through interaction with the rule-enforcers and readjusted his symbolic universe in terms of its meaning”. Thus there was nothing purposive about initial acts of rulebreaking, in the sense that the rules themselves were not deliberately breached. No individual consciously sets out to be a criminal or a deviant, the argument went. Instead, individuals perform actions, some of which break rules; rule-enforcers react by stigmatising the rule-breaker; the rule-breaker internalises the stigmatisation and begins to perceive themselves as criminal or deviant. In effect, the label generates the behaviour, or at least the self-definition (Sumner 1976: 168–170).6 This idea soon became untenable. “Mere empirical observation” of the “collective celebrations of deviance and political rebellion in the late 1960s were the final nail in the coffin: one could not make the label generate the behaviour” (Sumner 1976: 170). Many acts of crime and deviance were patently conscious and purposive. Individuals and groups actually strove for the status of Becker’s ‘outsider’. Thus, symbolic interactionism’s implication of passivity was doomed.7 This was precisely the issue that The New Criminology sought to resolve. Criminals and deviants were fully aware of the choices they were making according to Taylor, Walton and Young. Indeed, this argument was extended so far that the deviant was recast as an almost heroic, proto-revolutionary actor, deliberately offending the norms of an oppressive society.8 For Taylor, Walton and Young the criminal or deviant was not “a passive, ineffectual, stigmatised individual” but a “decision maker who often actively violates the moral and legal codes of society”, such that “deviance is a property of the act rather than a spurious label” (1973: 147, 221). Thus a sense of intentionality was placed at the very heart of The New Criminology’s concept of deviance. Sumner too adopted the notion of the purposive actor. However, he identified a flaw in Taylor, Walton and Young’s formulation: “Purposiveness is merely a common element of all human practice and indicates nothing about deviance” (Sumner 1976: 169). Crime and deviance may well be purposive acts, but if this is true of all social practice then a definition of

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crime and deviance cannot be based upon it. So, whilst Taylor, Walton and Young were rightly lauded for their efforts at producing a ‘fully social theory of deviance’ (1973: 270–278) and discussing the processes of societal reaction, The New Criminology failed to furnish a clear and rigorous concept of crime or deviance; pointing out the purposive nature of criminal and deviant acts was necessary, but not sufficient.9 Nevertheless, by drawing from these bodies of thought, Sumner was able to provide the basis for a revitalised Marxian comprehension of crime and deviance. From symbolic interactionism came the notion of labelling, the sense that crime or deviance is a quality of the label and not of the act (but not that crime and deviance is therefore a passive activity that takes shape only when the label has been applied and adopted). From The New Criminology came the idea that crime and deviance is purposive action (but not the idea that this alone constitutes crime and deviance; criminal and deviant action must also be labelled as such). In addition, of course, was the idea derived from Hirst that a Marxist theory of crime and deviance must be reworked from within the categories of Marxism (but not the idea that this is impossible). Sumner allied these theoretical antecedents with his notion of ideology, deftly transcending the work of his forebears in the process. Not only did this satisfy Hirst’s requirement concerning the extension of existing categories of Marxism, but it led to a new understanding of crime and deviance as ideological ‘censures’ of certain behaviours at certain times and places. In short, because the social world generates offensive behaviours as well as perceptions of offensiveness, crime and deviance are always ‘doubly socially constructed’ (Sumner 2004a: 6). It therefore makes sense to see crime and deviance both “as practical or behavioural responses to social conditions and as social censures reflecting the emotions, ideologies, and values of powerful social groups” (Sumner 2004a: 9). But there is nothing inherent in any particular act that makes it automatically criminal or deviant. Thus, for Sumner, ‘crime’ and ‘deviance’ are best regarded as elements of highly contextualised moral and political discourses; “negative ideological categories with specific historical application” (Sumner 1990a: 26). These negative categories are social censures. In given contexts, certain (purposive) actions

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are marked off as being ‘criminal’ or ‘deviant’. Such actions are those that offend the interests, the morality or the ideology of those in positions of power and authority (Sumner 1982: 35).10 Their establishment in the apparently neutral language of law and policy merely conceals “their fundamental character as moral ideology, as partial and partisan judgements of what is truly immoral, useless, dangerous anti-social and inadequate” (Sumner 1990a: 16–17). Thus, in the end, “crime is not a behaviour, it is a social censure. Anything could in principle be picked out and censured as crime, anything could be criminalized; what is censured depends on the historical period and culture, the context, the level of outrage, the depth of interest and the perspective of the viewer. It is a bit like beauty. It is very much in the eye of the beholder” (Sumner 2017: 4). As Sumner (1990a: 37) has argued, “to describe the categories of crime and deviance as ideological is not simply to denounce them, or to explain them away, but to say something important about their nature and functioning”. Nevertheless, it is clearly the case that the vision of censure developed by Sumner takes us beyond the remit of ‘criminology’ and the study of crime and deviance as traditionally conceived. If our object of study is viewed as a censure authorised by the powerful rather than, for example, behaviour peculiar to certain groups of people (Sumner 1990a), then it follows that “crime itself is unobservable— because it is an evaluative category (e.g. killing is observable but it could be heroism in war)” (Sumner 2015: 196). Furthermore, the category of ‘crime’, once it is revealed as a state construction, need not delimit the scope of ‘criminological’ investigation. Indeed, according to Sumner, “any criminology which ignores the social roots and contested character of the criminal justice system, by taking the state definitions of crime as adequate definitions of types of behaviour, is not only antediluvian but also discreditable as a dominant-ideological arm of the state” (1990b: 2). Further still, to accept state definitions of crime “is to convey the sectional and historical tools of the state into universally valid behavioural concepts. It is to take the state as God of all knowledge and to assume that even popular assent to legislation automatically transforms context bound political judgement into universal truth” (Sumner 1994: 301–302).

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Censure in Action Over the years, Sumner has repeatedly stressed the role that censure plays in the reproduction of hegemony. He argues that as a mode of production becomes established, it “gradually extends its tentacles into every sphere of social practice”; ideological forms “antithetical to its existence will eventually be incorporated or abolished” (1979: 51). Those with the power to do so will seek to extinguish the competing ideologies of their subordinates, partly because such competing ideologies represent a threat, but partly because their own way of looking at the world—their “understandings, ideas and perceptions” (Sumner 1979: 287)—appears, to them, to be perfectly reasonable.11 As Sumner put it in a passage that now sounds at once curiously dated and yet remarkably prescient, “the practical ideologies of the non-owning majority are now daily bombarded (opposed, mediated or reinforced) by a stream of practical and philosophical ideology from the powerful devices of the owners and controllers, the big and small bourgeoisie” (1979: 52). Thus those ideological forms necessary for the stability of a given mode of production come to establish themselves as pre-eminent. Censures, as ideological forms, are central to this process. Sumner notes that all groups of people develop censures, but in class societies, the economically dominant class will have the greatest capacity to assert its censures, for instance, through the legal system and through its control of media and communication (1990a: 27, 1976: 170). The “daily censure of crime attempts to unify and publicise the hegemonic bloc’s vision of its nation and morality”; offenders are marked off from non-offenders, good symbolically marked off from evil (Sumner 1990c: 47–49). In this way, the sectional censures of the dominant class can become social censures, widely accepted and internalised even by subordinate classes (Sumner 1976: 170), and contribute to the reproduction of hegemony. Seen in this light definitions of crime and deviance, and indeed criminal justice itself, are always fundamentally political rather than being neutral, technical exercises (Sumner and Sandberg 1990: 190) or mere ‘superstructural mist’ (Sumner 1976: 173). Censures represent interests and express a worldview. For Sumner, “to the extent that criminal justice does not

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reflect the opinions and interests of all sectors of the polity, it becomes an instrument of sectional violence” (Sumner 1990c: 44). According to him, crime and deviance are constituted by “a series of normative divides or ideological cuts, cuts made in social practice—and the dominant cuts made in our society are those made by the rich, powerful and authoritative. It is their distinctions, forged in the heat of driving interests and conflictual practical enforcement, in the practice of conquest, domination and possession, which divide the world up into the positive and negative, right and wrong, normal and deviant” (Sumner 1994: 299). Despite this, censures are not blunt tools of class domination. Though capitalist criminal justice systems tend to reflect the economic, political and ideological interests of the hegemonic class, they must also respond to the needs of other groups or they will not command assent. As such, censures tend to invoke widely accepted general principles of an era, ‘albeit superficially, selectively and partially’ (Sumner 1990a: 28).12 Thus it is wrong to see censures as aspects of wholly negative discourses, or as “simple class instruments expressing undiluted economic ideology” (Sumner and Sandberg 1990: 188). Instead, each censure embodies “generalised social ideologies reflecting generalised social relations, rich with historical conflict, monuments to divisions of wealth, power and consciousness” (Sumner 1976: 173). Ultimately, social censures and criminal justice practices more generally “are not just instruments for defining ‘deviance’ and catching ‘criminals’”, but are “important ideological resources in the practical business of hegemonic politics” and potential sites of struggle (Sumner and Sandberg 1990: 190).

Censure and the Late Modern Condition Throughout his oeuvre, Sumner has consistently argued that the notion of censure is becoming increasingly relevant. Most famously, in The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary (1994) he suggested that deviance was a feature of the modern phase of social history. In simple terms, this is because deviance, by definition, is measured against consensus

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expectations and norms. The consensus that began to crystallise in modernity, even if it was less developed than is sometimes supposed (Sumner 1994: 302, 309), has been exploded in late modernity. In place of the ordered world of modernity, we now live in a social world where “diversity is now the anti-norm, or norm, depending on how you look at it. The social as the fabric of society, the state-backed political consensus of welfarism, has been replaced by the idea of the universality of difference or the normality of deviation” (Sumner 2004a: 24). Indeed, the very term ‘social’ “connotes a bygone age of integrated communities, welfare states, militant trade unions, and class politics” (Sumner 2004a: 23–24), and fails to register the Hobbesian nature of contemporary reality or the “all consuming black hole that is the dominance of things, individualist greed, and impersonal organisation” (Sumner 2004a: 28). As a result, the historic meaning and function of deviance has been lost; one cannot deviate if there is no agreement on what constitutes the ‘normal’ or non-deviant. Sumner has expressed these ideas in particularly forceful terms: “The sociological concept of deviance was not some great transcendental truth striding through history. It was not even used until the twentieth century, nor does it serve us well to understand forms or categories of censured practices in previous epochs. ‘Deviance’ as an idea is on a par with ‘degeneracy’ from the nineteenth century: both are censures reflecting the ideological and historical character of thinking about blame and transgression during their time. Censure is the general, trans-historical concept, the idea that is workable in all periods, the term that appears in Shakespeare, Sellin and Becker” (2012: 171). As the ‘social’ steadily disintegrates in vertiginous (Young 2007) late modernity, the true nature of deviance and crime as political constructs is gradually revealed. Crime and deviance are now best understood “as the dominant censures of the day, reflecting dominant economic, political and cultural interests and preferences and targeting the groups, individuals and acts offending those interests and preferences. A particular censure of crime or deviance, and the level of its enforcement, may approximate to some democratically shared ‘social’ value to some degree, and may even contribute to some poorly defined social health, but as a whole censures and their enforcement tend to reflect

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the antisocial interests of capital, patriarchy and ethnicities” (Sumner 2004a: 28).13 Indeed, “in an antisocial world no behaviour has uncontested meanings and disapproval is more a sign of powerful interest than moral purity” (Sumner 2004a: 20). As criminal justice becomes “more overtly an ideological and political force used by the directors of society to restore and restructure their hegemony” (Sumner and Sandberg 1990: 188), it can begin to seem that, “like the staircase outside the building in ‘postmodern’ architecture, morality is now on the outside of society trying to get back in. It is no longer a key foundation of the whole structure” (Sumner 2012: 174). Ultimately, the real nature of crime and deviance as censures will only become clearer as the fracturing social processes of late modernity intensify and the once solid structures and relative accord of modernity melt into air.14

The Influence of the Theory of Censure As this collection attests, Sumner’s work on censure has been influential in various branches of criminology, sociology and the like. That said, its impact is rather uneven and the notion of censure has certainly not assumed the status of a disciplinary orthodoxy, and is often ignored even in contexts where one would perhaps expect it to be recognised and utilised.15 There are a number of reasons for this. One is the polarising effect that Sumner’s Obituary has had. Whilst there were those who were broadly sympathetic and largely accepted the argument proposed in the book (Loader 1995; Venkatash 1995; O’ Connell 1995; Roberts 1996; Bendle 1999; Mitchell Miller et al. 2001; Best 2004; Moxon 2011a), there were others, particularly in the US, who were opposed to it, often quite aggressively so (Goode 1995, 2002, 2003, 2004a, 2004b; Hendershott 2002). Thus in certain circles, Sumner’s name has become a provocative one, and this has not helped the dissemination of the notion of censure that arguably remains his fundamental contribution and underpins his position on deviance which was expressed so forcefully in the Obituary. A second barrier to more widespread acceptance of the notion of censure is its avowedly Marxian heritage, in a world where Marxism

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is generally seen as antediluvian and antiquated.16 The very particular problem that the early work of Sumner attempted to solve, namely the manner in which a Marxian criminology could best conceptualise and theorise crime and deviance, also seems to the modern reader to be something of a relic from a bygone age.17 Yet in the end, the theory of censure must surely stand or fall on its own coherence and plausibility, rather than on its relation to a particular school of thought. This is particularly the case in a context where contemporary critical criminology is characterised by diversity, fragmentation, cross fertilisation and a lack of ‘self-contained theoretical clusters’ as it increasingly loosens its explicit links with Marxian social theory (Tierney 2010: 334–335, 361). Of course, despite this ongoing process, echoes of Marxism can be found even in the work of those who are not expressly Marxian in orientation, such as left realists, cultural criminologists, feminist criminologists, green criminologists, ‘ultra realists’ and those who theorise punishment, globalisation, white collar crime, corporate crime, moral panics and the media. In fact, whilst few commentators take an explicitly Marxian approach to social issues today, the central thrust of Marxian theory is now widely adopted by social theorists of all hues and “it is more difficult than in the past […] to see where Marxism begins and ends” (Downes and Rock 2007: 324). Indeed, “it is questionable what it means to take a specifically Marxist approach to history when the materialist axiom, the cornerstone of the Marxist approach, has become central to almost all contemporary social thought” (Roemer 1988: 124).18 Thus, whilst some proponents of critical criminology may wear their Marxism more lightly or even disavow it completely, the theory of censure should not be sidelined simply due to its intellectual and political heritage when, as we will see, it continues to shed light on our present-day circumstances.

Sumner’s Concept of Censure: An Application Sumner’s work on censure, despite being rooted in the criminological debates of the 1970s that are now but a distant memory, is beginning to seem remarkably prescient. To suggest how this is so, for the remainder

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of this chapter the focus will fall upon a single example of censure, as Sumner himself has suggested is necessary (2015: 201–202). However, whereas most previous studies have focussed upon the censuring practices of those in positions of authority (see, for example, the collection of essays in Sumner 1990d), this section will feature a censure made by a group of individuals lacking institutional power but nevertheless emboldened enough to censure aggressively. Through this necessarily brief analysis it will become clear that, at a time when censure is becoming ubiquitous, the censures of subordinate groups are especially revealing about the nature of contemporary society. As Sumner has argued, any attempt to understand a particular manifestation of an ideology such as a censure must always attend to the immediate context within which it takes place; “critique of social censure should never ignore the problem such censure responds to or tries to resolve; and praise for liberal tolerance likewise” (Sumner 2014: 110). Yet in addition to this, as Sumner pointed out way back in Reading Ideologies, it is also vitally important to consider the deeper structural conditions that stimulate each censure’s emergence and shape its operation in practice (1979: 292). In more recent years, Sumner has increasingly come to see this endeavour as being congruent with the critical realist view of social science (2015: 198), as developed in the early work of Bhaskar (1975, 1989) and exemplified by Marx himself (Sumner 2015: 199). Critical realism seeks to “detect and outline the generative mechanisms or internal structures of phenomena that explain their surface manifestation” (Sumner 2015: 198). Its essence “consists in the movement, at any one level of enquiry, from manifest phenomena to the structures that generate them” (Bhaskar 1989: 19). Thus, analyses of this type must take as their starting point specific instances of social censure, and seek to “decipher, to decode, to take off masks, to recognise the underlying faces, and to connect up the dots in the bigger picture” (Sumner 2015: 203).19 On the evening of Friday 11 May 2012, a football match between Sheffield United and Stevenage took place at the latter’s home stadium in the Hertfordshire town. The game constituted the first leg of their League 1 play-off semi-final. The winners of the two-legged tie would go on to Wembley to play a one-off game to decide the third promotion

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spot to the second tier of English football. Sheffield United, traditionally a team used to competing at a higher level of football, had looked set for automatic promotion during the season but were pipped at the last by their local rivals Sheffield Wednesday and had been forced to enter the play-offs. A major contributory factor in their failure to secure automatic promotion was the jailing of their 35 goal top scorer, Welsh international striker Ched Evans. On 20 April 2012, with three games left in the season, he was convicted of rape and sentenced to 5 years imprisonment. Sheffield United failed to win any of their remaining fixtures and their local rivals were able to overtake them at the vital moment.20 Prior to the game, a number of Sheffield United supporters congregated at a pub within walking distance of the stadium, situated on a neat council estate on the southern outskirts of the post-war ‘new town’. With the pub full of travelling supporters, a great number spilled outside into the beer garden, car park and the adjacent street. Among their number was a group of a dozen or so males in their late teens and early twenties. As well as chanting songs in support of their team, they began to aggressively protest the innocence of Evans on unspecified grounds.21 Curtains twitched as nervous locals observed the angry scene, confused and wary passers-by crossed the road to avoid the group, and visitors to a shop opposite the pub made sure to leave quickly once they had returned to their vehicles. Attention soon turned to other aspects of the Evans case. The victim, a blameless young woman, was named.22 The group, becoming increasingly agitated, targeted her in a series of derogatory chants. And, in the particular instance to be analysed here, she was censured as a ‘slag’.23 The immediate context of this censure was the group in question’s disappointment at the failure of their football team to gain promotion, a feeling exacerbated by a series of repeated misfortunes over the years and the fact that their fierce local rivals denied them on this particular occasion. Justifiably or otherwise, the Evans case and its aftermath provided an easily identifiable target of blame upon which their frustration could be projected. The victim in the case, a young woman who maintained throughout that she simply could not remember the events of the night in question, was held responsible by the group for their

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team’s failure on the sporting field. Whilst the young fans’ attitude might well seem perverse and unreasonable, as we will see these are just the types of circumstance, ripe with conflict and mutually antagonistic interests, where “ideologies condense, focus and develop […] in the form of succinct terms of abuse or social censures” (Sumner and Sandberg 1990: 163). The readiness of the group to censure so swiftly and aggressively is indicative of a social world that is increasingly generative of censoriousness. As Sumner has argued, “out there, censure is ubiquitous. […] This new century is a time of censure both in thought and in action” (2012: 165), and not just among those with institutional, political or economic power. And, at the very moment that censure has become omnipresent, we appear to have lost any common ground that might help determine what should and should not be censured, and the appropriate mechanisms for doing so. There is no shared moral code or set of normative prescriptions that, when breached, result in censure. The lack of accord on what constitutes acceptable behaviour, and thus what is worthy of censure, was brought into sharp relief in Stevenage that night. Evans’ behaviour was seen by the young fans as ‘normal’, the routine actions of a ‘lad’ on a night out. The authorities who pursued the case and the Crown Court jury in Caernarfon that had found Evans guilty clearly felt otherwise; in their view a crime had taken place. Yet for the fans, the verdict of the court held little sway and was not seen as authoritative; indeed, “very few pronunciations from authorities are granted any moral weight” (Sumner 2012: 174) by subjects wallowing in the “immobilising nihilism [and] cynicism […] of our times” (Winlow 2014: 173). In such a context, as Sumner writes, “it is [surely] misleading to refer to ‘deviant behaviour’ when any behaviour could be censured as deviant depending on the context and when there are many moralities in an amoral world” (2012: 170). Thus, there is a sense that, in the absence of shared social understandings of appropriate conduct, we are left with only opposed censures (Sumner 2012: 168–169) issued by groups who fundamentally do not recognise or understand the others’ point of view. As Sumner has argued, “we [have] moved from moral conflict to deep uncertainty about the idea of morality itself, yet at the same time many new social conditions, such as lack of trust, heightened insecurity and

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perceived proximity and degree of risk, have maximised an inclination to censure, wherever and whenever, always others first of course, and in that quagmire of censoriousness without normative security we try to find out judgmental feet to this day. We live in a world of censure” (2012: 175). And as this case shows, in that ‘world of censure’ even a young rape victim is fair game for hostile and belittling denunciation. Whilst the fluctuating fortunes of a football team and a seemingly increasingly censorious body politic provide the immediate context of the Stevenage censure, its deeper wellsprings must also be considered. The censure in question, like any other, can be seen as a highly compressed manifestation of a number of distinct but overlapping ideological formations. Although the term ‘slag’ itself is not an especially novel label of condemnation, its deployment in this context brings into clear view a number of such ideological formations that are particularly virile in the contemporary social world. First and perhaps most obviously, this was a distinctly masculine censure. It has long been argued that young men face an increasingly difficult task in accomplishing (Messerschmidt 1993) or performing (Jefferson 1997) socially constructed notions of masculinity (see Collier 2004). The forms of ‘tough’ working class masculinity that emerged in the world of heavy industry in places like Sheffield persist, but the young men of today who are far more likely to work in insecure part time, service sector jobs—if indeed they work at all—are often no longer able to easily realise them. It has also been suggested that for those with limited economic and political power, one’s social status among peers assumes a much greater significance that it otherwise might, and can be a resource in securing one’s standing as a ‘real man’ (Michalski 2017). Going to the football and behaving aggressively represents one potential solution to this problem. The group clearly revelled in the unease they were causing to local residents and passers-by with their consciously loud and antagonistic conduct; this was a performance of sorts as the group strove to display their masculine credentials. Aligning themselves with Evans who, as an athletically gifted, successful and wealthy professional sportsperson personified the masculine ideal, perhaps also served this function. Furthermore, the censure itself

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(‘slag’) clearly revealed the group’s antediluvian attitudes to women. The woman was very publicly demeaned and denigrated for not measuring up to a supposed ideal of femininity. Simultaneously, male superiority was being asserted along with a sense of their ‘special liberty’24 in relation to women; Evans’ own behaviour, when despite having a partner he concluded his night on the town by having sex with a woman whilst his friends looked on, was celebrated. Thus the censure and the manner in which it was delivered might be read as an attempt to project a very specific version of masculinity in a social world where the opportunities to do so are becoming limited. Second, we should remember that these were young men at leisure, and the act of denunciation was almost carnivalesque in its nature. Thus, we might contend that there was an ideology of hedonism at work here. Bauman (1997: 146) has charted the shift from a society of ‘soldier producers’ to one of ‘sensation gatherers’ where, in the face of spiralling insecurity and anxiety, there is an increasing emphasis placed on cathartic, hedonistic rewards (Winlow and Hall 2006: 69). Indeed, nihilistic pleasure-seeking has become a key plank of identity and lifestyle for the alienated and frustrated workers of late modernity ensconced within a culture that valorises immediate gratification and sensual engagement (Hayward 2004: 152). Today’s social world is one where “we submit to the rules of our community not by attenuating or redirecting self-interested libidinal drives but precisely by committing to personal indulgence and gorging ourselves on stupid, solipsistic pleasures” (Winlow and Hall 2013: 113). In this context, a mode of football fandom involving drinking, drug taking, petty acts of vandalism, and a generally aggressive, belligerent attitude has become the norm for a significant minority of those who travel the country in support of their team. This, of course, has a long history, but today it is often more about ostentatious posturing than it is about the actual commission of interpersonal violence. The censorious group in question were sensation-seeking ‘edgeworkers’ of sorts, momentarily disrupting the “sense of an ordered existence” (Lyng 1990: 857) as they derived their thrills from the noisy shaming of another. The showy nature of the censure, barked loudly in the street, was thus important, as was its

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implied support for the hedonism of Evans. The victim, of course, was not afforded the same liberty as the footballer. Third, the censure was shaped by what we might term an ideology of dissociation. The censorious group saw themselves as being somehow isolated, alienated and misunderstood, and this manifested itself in a number of interconnected ways. In the first place, it helps to partly explain the personal affront felt by the group at the fact that their football team’s season was derailed by the verdict in the Evans case. This is because in a fracturing social world where the old axes of work, family and community are no longer able to provide fixity of condition or a stable basis for identity formation, institutions such as football teams might play a more vital role in the construction of identity and their successes and failures are more likely to be taken as one’s own; “after all, in the meaningless entropy of post-modernity, you [are] lucky to have an identity” (Sumner 2012: 175). The young woman, having become an unwitting character in football’s daily soap opera, found herself the target of vicious censuring by young men who saw their team’s fortunes as central to their well-being and happiness. Moreover, the censure also highlighted the seemingly increasingly antagonistic relations between individuals in broadly similar material positions (Moxon 2011b). The group did not only attack the ostensible target of their censure, but also those fellow Sheffield United fans who were present in Stevenage but who did not share their views. These were people from broadly similar backgrounds, mostly of the same city, and with a shared affection for their football team so strong that it had motivated them to travel 150 miles or so on a Friday night to watch the game. Yet there was little sense of mutual interest that night outside the pub, even among members of the same small community. A number of Sheffield United fans were visibly uncomfortable with the chanting taking place, although the group was not challenged. This supports the idea that, in what we might call a ‘post-social’ age (Sumner 2004a: 23–24), it is now far easier to see others as one’s enemies, or as somehow ‘morally degenerate’ (Sumner 1990c: 50). As Hall, Winlow and Ancrum relate, in place of old notions of class solidarity there is now a Hobbesian “expectation of self-interest on behalf of others” and life is “motivated by the individual’s perception of a constant struggle with hostile others in a

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dog-eat-dog world” (2008: 192–195), where the so-called ‘pseudo-pacification process’ is under strain (Hall and Winlow 2005; Hall 2015: 137). Further still, the censure was also aimed more generally at the ‘politically correct’, ‘bleeding-heart liberalism’ (Sumner 2004a: 24) that is, rightly or wrongly, seen as the preserve of an out of touch metropolitan elite. The group was made up of reflexive, self-aware individuals, issuing a deliberately provocative assertion of otherness from an establishment that did not represent them or their views, unencumbered by such twee notions as an aspirational working class respectability. This was but a tiny part of a censorious war of all against all. As Sumner suggests, “the most important intrinsic character of ideology is that it is a partial sign or sectional representation of the social world, and therefore its partiality can only be analysed accurately in full in relation to the national or international social context that provoked it and which it re-presents in specific historical circumstances” (Sumner 1990b: 5). Given this, if the censuring of the victim in the Ched Evans case can be theorised, in part, as a product of the ideologies of masculinity, hedonism and dissociation, then the next task is to consider from where these ideologies themselves draw their vitality. Briefly, one might point to the neoliberal shake-out of society over the last few decades, which has involved a bumpy transition from the relative stability of post-war modernity to a vertiginous (Young 2007), liquid (Bauman 2000) late modernity, as providing fertile conditions for ideologies such as the ones discussed here. At its heart is the revitalisation of the classical liberal principle of minimally constrained competitive individualism. This has, among other things, reversed many of the advances of the post-war era that saw relatively stable working communities begin “to value each other more as members of socio-political collectives”; as we have seen, today’s ‘permanently uprooted individuals’ tend to view each other as “hostile, competing monads and therefore potential enemies” (Hall 2007: 98). In this context, it is hardly surprising that ideological formations valorising an aggressive, hard-nosed masculinity, a fatalistic, empty hedonism, and a deep suspicion of the dissociated other in a radically fractured social world have prospered, and are able to coalesce in specific censures such as the one analysed here.

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Put simply, “there is every reason to expect a condensation of ideologies of differing parentage, reflecting not only the generalised economic and political relations, but also the ‘structure of feelings’ (Williams 1977: 128), or the general mood, of the present conjuncture” (Sumner and Sandberg 1990: 165). The failure of their football team merely provided the whetstone on which the anger of the young fans was sharpened, but the real ‘raw materials’ of the censure were those ideologies ingrained in fundamental social processes that were then creatively deployed in the context of the events close at hand (Sumner and Sandberg 1990: 187). The vigour of these ideologies, as we have seen, was evident in both the content of the actual censure itself and the manner in which it was deployed. In the end, for all their rebellious posturing and their mocking of the pretensions of authority, the young men who censured Evans’ victim as a ‘slag’ were inescapably of their time and place, unwitting exemplars of the types of subjectivity that are called forth by late modern neoliberal capitalist social relations; their censure offered up a highly compacted and condensed form (Sumner 2015: 207) of their worldview, with its roots deep in the toxic soil of our age.

Conclusion This chapter has, in its first section, illustrated that the notion of censure remains theoretically robust and, in its second section, demonstrated censure’s increasing relevance in what is a social world characterised by rupture. Indeed if, as is surely the case, theory itself “is lodged within an historical period and societal conditions that feed its plausibility” (Sumner 2012: 165), it is difficult to see censure theory becoming anything other than increasingly important; after all, we appear to have arrived at a point where “no one in casino capitalism is really ‘in charge’: there are just angry people censuring each other across various chasms” (Sumner 2012: 176). To this end, by analysing a specific censure of a subordinate group lacking institutionalised power, it has been possible to show how their censures, like the ones of powerful, are often antisocial and antagonistic. This should not surprise us. After

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all, those at the lower levels of society are most exposed to the disruptive effects of neoliberal capitalism as it continues to wreak havoc on established forms of sociability and subjectivity. As Sumner has written in a passage on lawbreakers that could easily be applied more widely, “the practices of offenders also reflect social tensions, and express particular political and ideological interpretations of those tensions. As Engels made clear in 1844, these responses are not necessarily any more or less progressive than those of the legislators or the police” (1990c: 46). Of course, it is important not to forget that “censure, of self or others, is necessary”, but this must be “in just measure, metered in moderation, and appropriate to the fault” (Sumner 2014: 99). And, as Sumner (2004b) himself has argued, “at the end of the day, there is no alternative but to face up to the painful task of deciding whether we still need to censure certain things, whether we still need to assign blame to our enemies, and to explore the vision of the world which delivers either another alternative set of censures or a mode of dispute resolution which can avoid blaming others”. Unfortunately, we seem to be steadily moving away from conditions that might engender such an exploration. The cacophony of angry censure seems set to continue.

Notes 1. This section develops arguments made previously in Moxon (2011a). 2. As Sumner points out, during this period his work was considered ‘neoMarxist’ or ‘Marxisant’ (Greenberg and Anderson 1981). However, he saw it as being derived from the central principles of a dynamic Marxist tradition (Sumner 1994: 303). 3. At this point Sumner’s concern was with ‘deviance’ alone. 4. See especially the chapter ‘Censure: Moral and Sociological’ in Reading Ideologies (Sumner 1979). What follows is a necessarily brief overview. 5. Of course, although he was among the first to do so, Sumner is not alone in expressing such sentiments. Hulsman, for example, memorably suggested that “crime has no ontological reality” and “crime is not the object but the product of criminal policy” (1986: 71). Note that this position does not require any denial of the self-evident truth that behaviours which are labelled as criminal can cause “harms, pains,

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suffering and injustice” and would continue to do so even if they were not so labelled (Reiner 2016: 33). As Sumner puts it, “crime continues to sit on the tightrope over the chasm between a faulty censure and a dangerous problem” (2014: 117). 6. Sumner consistently takes a strong line on this point. For criticism of this interpretation of interactionism, see Downes and Rock (2007: 164–175). 7. The more radical conflict theorists of the early 1970s noted the class foundations and functions of labelling practices. Indeed, the reluctance of symbolic interactionism to address issues of power always lay at the heart of Marxism’s unease with it. See the famous critique by Gouldner (1968) and also Beirne (1979: 377). 8. This trend was still evident in some strands of Young’s later work; see, for example, Ferrell et al. (2008). 9. This was not Sumner’s only criticism of the concept of deviance employed in The New Criminology. See Sumner (1976: 160–164). 10. This also justifies the conceptual elision of crime and deviance; they are both ideological censures. Of course single instances of behaviour can be censured as both criminal and deviant, although often they are censured as one and not the other. 11. Sumner was keen to stress this point in Reading Ideologies: “What is probably the hardest thing to grasp theoretically is the fact that all understandings, ideas and perceptions are obviously perfectly sensible and necessary in specific social situations” (1979: 287). 12. See also Hirst (1975b: 240) and, famously, E.P. Thompson (1975: 263–266). 13. This was brought into sharp relief by the respective responses to those involved in causing the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the rioters of 2011. As Sumner trenchantly argued, “if we compare investment bankers with rioters, we can see that the rich and powerful often engage in anti-social behaviour but are rarely censured as anti-social for it in the media or in popular culture. [The rich and powerful] can send thousands to their deaths in war, ensure their friends and relatives obtain lucrative government contracts, or destroy the life-savings of ordinary workers but none of that would ever be classified as social deviance. That tells you all you need to know about deviance” (2012: 169). 14. The watershed moment in this process of revelation arguably came in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher’s successful election campaign

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explicitly politicised crime and justice issues. Crime and deviance have remained overtly political issues ever since (Sumner 1994: 310). On the ‘return of politics’ and Thatcher, see Sumner (1990a) and Sumner and Sandberg (1990). 15. For example, this has been the case in works on Marxism and criminology (see, for instance, Cowling 2008) and also in some criminology textbooks, such as the otherwise remarkably comprehensive Criminology by Newburn (2013). 16. Indeed, in a review of Sumner’s 1990 edited collection Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice, the reviewer made reference to what even then was seen as “the crumbling edifice of Marxism” (Stenson 1992: 232). 17. Sumner (1990a: 15) writes of this, “students still ask ‘Whatever happened to the theoretical debates about deviance in the early 1970s?’ […] Perhaps the revulsion for theory and theoretical wrangling, the return of empirical research, the new popularity of historical work and the general air of hard-nosed realism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, have all contributed to the demise of theoretical dynamics in this field”. Perhaps only now, with the rise of so-called ‘ultra realism’ (Hall, Winlow and Ancrum 2008; Hall 2012; Winlow and Atkinson 2012; Hall and Winlow 2015), is this being addressed. 18. This is perhaps rooted in the inevitable paradox that Marxism, like any theory, must face; if it is not plausible then it will simply disappear, but if it is plausible then it is likely to be subsumed into the mainstream of social science and cease to be specifically Marxist (Elster 1986: 5). As such one might argue that the decline of explicitly Marxian work in critical criminology is, in some small part, a result of the fundamental theoretical plausibility of the materialist perspective, however counterintuitive that may seem. 19. Sumner continues to see Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978) as a stellar example of this mode of analysis (see Sumner 2015: 205–207). 20. Evans continued to maintain his innocence. He was refused leave from the Court of Appeal to appeal his conviction on 20 August 2012, a decision later confirmed on 6 November 2012 by a panel of three judges. In July 2014, supported by a new legal team, Evans took his case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. He was released from prison on 17 October 2014 to serve the remainder of his sentence on licence. After prioritising Evans’ case, in October 2015 the CCRC announced that they were referring the case back to the Court of

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Appeal on the basis of new material that was not considered by the jury at the original trial. This appeal was heard on 22 and 23 March 2016. On 21 April 2016, it was announced that Evans’ conviction had been quashed and a retrial ordered. On 20 June 2016, Evans signed a 1-year contract for League 1 side Chesterfield and resumed his professional career. On 14 October 2016, Evans was found not guilty following his retrial at Cardiff Crown Court. 21. Evans himself had been regularly censured by opposition fans throughout the 2011–2012 season as he awaited trial. He was taunted with chants of “she said no, Evans, she said no” to the tune of the American spiritual Kumbaya and he was frequently booed and barracked. 22. The victim had initially been named on Twitter in the days following the original trial. Ten people were later convicted for this breach of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992, which grants victims of rape and alleged rape anonymity for life (BBC News 2013). On the impact of this on the victim, see The Guardian (2014). In the years that followed Evans’ conviction as he fought to clear his name in the midst of a media furore over the case, Twitter (along with other platforms) was used extensively to censure Evans, the victim, and those on the other side of the argument (see, for example, McVeigh 2014; Ziegler 2015). 23. The censured young woman will be referred to as the ‘victim’ of the crime, as was the legal position in May 2012 when this incident occurred. Of course, it is important to acknowledge again the fact that Evans’ conviction for rape was subsequently overturned. 24. Hall and Winlow (2015: 91) describe special liberty as “the dark side of liberal individualism, a sociopathic anti-ethos that consists of a sense of entitlement felt by an individual who will risk harm to others in order to further his own instrumental or expressive interests”.

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Sumner, C. (1990b). Introduction: Contemporary socialist criminology. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. 1–12). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990c). Reflections on a sociological theory of criminal justice systems. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. 41–56). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (1990d). Censure, politics and criminal justice. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1994). The sociology of deviance: An obituary. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (2004a). The social nature of crime and deviance. In C. Sumner (Ed.), The Blackwell companion to criminology (pp. 3–31). Oxford: Blackwell. Sumner, C. (2004b, March 12). Social censure and political domination. Paper delivered at the University of Turin. Sumner, C. (2012). Censure, culture and political economy: Beyond the death of deviance debate. In S. Hall & S. Winlow (Eds.), New directions in criminological theory (pp. 165–180). London: Routledge. Sumner, C. (2014). Measure for measure: Justice in the society of censure. In M. V. Jacobsen (Ed.), The poetics of crime: Understanding and researching crime and deviance through creative sources (pp. 97–118). Farnham: Ashgate. Sumner, C. (2015). Critical realism, overdetermination and social censure. In D. Crewe & R. Lippens (Eds.), What is criminology about? Philosophical reflections (pp. 195–209). Abingdon: Routledge. Sumner, C. (2017). Criminology through the looking-glass. In A. Amatrudo & R. E. Rauxloh (Eds.), Law in popular belief: Myth and reality. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sumner, C., & Sandberg, S. (1990). The press censure of “dissident minorities”: The ideology of parliamentary democracy, Thatcherism and “Policing the Crisis”. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. 163–193). Buckingham: Open University Press. Taylor, I., Walton, P., & Young, J. (1973). The new criminology: For a social theory of deviance. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Thompson, E. P. (1975). Whigs and hunters: The origin of the Black Act. London: Allen Lane. The Guardian. (2014, December 28). Ched Evans’s rape victim had to change name and move five times, says father. Retrieved November 11, 2016, from https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/dec/28/ched-evans-rape-victim-change-name-move-house-father.

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Tierney, J. (2010). Criminology: Theory and context (3rd ed.). Harlow: Pearson. Venkatash, S. A. (1995). Review of Sumner’s sociology of deviance. American Journal of Sociology, 100(6), 1632–1634. Wiles, P. (Ed.). (1976). The sociology of crime and delinquency in Britain. Volume two: The new criminologies. London: Martin Robertson. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winlow, S. (2014). Some thoughts on Steve Hall’s “Theorizing crime and deviance: A new perspective”. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, 6(2), 168–177. Winlow, S., & Atkinson, R. (Eds.). (2012). New directions in crime and deviancy. Abingdon: Routledge. Winlow, S., & Hall, S. (2006). Violent night: Urban leisure and contemporary culture. Oxford: Berg. Young, J. (2007). The vertigo of late modernity. London: Sage. Ziegler, M. (2015, January 8). Ched Evans deal was axed after “vile and abusive threats, including death threats”, reveal Oldham. The Independent. Retrieved November 11, 2016, from http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/ football/news-and-comment/ched-evans-deal-was-axed-after-vile-and-abusive-threats-including-death-threats-reveal-oldham-9966042.html.

Author Biography David Moxon  is a former senior lecturer in criminology at Sheffield Hallam University. Following undergraduate and postgraduate studies in law and international political economy, David undertook doctoral research on a sociolegal theme. He was awarded his Ph.D., entitled ‘Marxist Legal Theory in Late Modernity’, by the University of Sheffield in 2008. As well as publishing pieces defending the ideas of Colin Sumner, his recent research has focused on contemporary issues of criminological theorising, including the viability of Marxian theory in the criminological arena and consumerism and its relation to crime. He is also involved in a project analysing the ‘hidden’ drug use of older adults.

Sensure? Public Art, Territorial Coding, and Censure Ronnie Lippens

Introduction Colin Sumner has explored and theorised his notion of social censure on many occasions (e.g. Sumner 1990). In his Sage Dictionary entry (2001), he describes social censures quite succinctly as manifestations of structurally generated ideological formations through which particular social or cultural practices are negatively targeted and blame is apportioned to specific groups or cultures. It is worth noting that, according to Sumner, social censure is not a mere matter of rational decision and subsequent exclusionary action. On the contrary, social censures, emerging from structural depths, are, by and large, fuelled by emotional energy. Censures, if they are to be sustained, must make sense to people. This can be read quite literally: censures must have a connection with

R. Lippens (*)  Keele University, Keele, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_12

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experience, and experience always and invariably is, also, a matter of the senses, of the body, of emotion. This emotional energy, indeed the whole sensory dimension of social censure, is the topic of this essay. In a nutshell, the argument will go as follows: in a largely de-centred and de-structured age such as ours, emotional energy flows freely, driving and fuelling a kaleidoscope of social censures which, ever more often, effectuate themselves directly at the level of sensory experience itself, and take shape—quite literally so—in the aesthetic sphere. It is there, in the realm of the aesthetic, that social censures do their work, at times quite abruptly (for example, through the aesthetics of the physical environment) but sometimes very subtly, for example, through the shapes and forms of public artwork emplacements. The focus in this contribution will be on public art as a vehicle for subtle, very subtle social censure. I shall return to this later, but before I do allow me to start again from a slightly different place. In a recent short paper, the artist Aileen Harvey (2014) describes and analyses a number of artworks through which individual artists have expressed and recorded—or at least made an attempt to do so— their experience of moving through a particular landscape. One artist, for example, rolled a plasticine ball through the streets of a particular city. The ball had thus gathered dust and all kinds of debris and as a piece of art, the bruised and dirtied ball in a way then represented the physical memory of its and the artist’s travels through the city’s streets, that is, the memory of their physical experience of moving through the city. But that is not all. The city, so to speak, had rubbed off on the ball as well as on the artist traveller. It had of course quite literally rubbed off on them, but the artist was making a broader point: moving through physical space, travellers collect, store and process a variety of ‘impressions’ (think of the ball again here) which contribute to their being, or better: to who, or what they are becoming. In other words, the sensory experience of space, and of particular spaces, is important. Space rubs off on people. People always carry with them, on them, and in them, traces of their experience of the spaces that they have travelled through. This has of course always been the case. But in an age such as ours, when language has lost its structural moorings, when conceptual rationality has been exposed as quite vacuous, and when the structural

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centre no longer holds—or indeed, has crumbled apart—the sensory experience of space has achieved the potential to connect almost immediately onto, and tap into, the reservoir of emotionality that runs almost unchecked through the veins of social, cultural and individual life. This is the broader cultural context which enables legal theorists such as Nathan Moore (2007) to claim that social control, or control, no longer works primordially through reason, but, rather, through the immediate impact of ‘iconic’ artefacts. Ours is an age of what Moore calls ‘iconic control’. Control, in this very late modernity of ours, works largely through sensory experience, that is, through the body. This is where public art, i.e. emplacements of artworks in public spaces, comes in. There is probably little coincidence in the fact that public art, in many late modern global cities and in urban regeneration projects, in particular, has seen a very significant resurgence since, roughly, the mid-1980s (Selwood 1995), i.e. at the dawn of the age of iconic control. Very often, in quite subtle ways, public artworks contribute to the arrangement of aesthetic experience of, and in, particular places. In other words, they contribute to what we shall term the territorial coding of space. That coding, as well as the aesthetic experience of thus coded territory, however subtle and delicate sometimes, always, and inevitably so, include an element of censure. Like so many other forms of iconic control, public artworks too quietly radiate a sense (the word is, once again, deliberate) of ‘how to be’, and ‘how not to be’. Public artworks beam out, so to speak, this sense at a deep, pre-conceptual level.

Public Art and Social Censure By the phrase ‘public art’ we mean here, quite simply, works of art that are emplaced in public spaces such as street corners, public squares, and so on. There is a whole debate on the definition of ‘public art’ (e.g. does it include temporary performance art, or ludic protest action, and so on) but for the purposes of this essay, we shall focus on permanent artworks in public spaces (although one hastens to add of course that ‘permanent, when it comes to public art, usually means a few decades).

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Public art has a long history that stretches from Antiquity to recent times. The Victorian age, for example, saw an explosion in the number of public statues that, more often than not, extolled the virtues and successes of Empire. And as we have seen above we have been able to witness a rebirth of public art from 1980s onwards. Most of the public artworks dating from 1980s and after were emplaced as part of urban regeneration strategies. Indeed, the decline of manufacturing, particularly in places like Britain, and the resulting dereliction of the urban environment, prompted authorities to devise and implement regeneration strategies that, at least in part, also included projects aimed at beautifying or, more broadly, reshaping the physical urban environment. Public artworks very often formed—and continue to form—a part of such projects. The focus in the remainder of this section will be on such regeneration projects. Many of those have, as we now know, led to the near complete restyling of urban centres. In a bid to attract investment capital most regeneration projects were, to a large extent, about projecting an image of what Phil Hubbard (1996) has called ‘entrepreneurial’ cityscapes and landscapes. This involved (and involves) the construction of highly modernistic glass-and-steel buildings and the installation of equally modern looking abstract artworks. In a way, this may remind us of Marc Augé’s (2009) notion of ‘non-places’, i.e. places with a fairly standardised modern, non-specific and indeed abstract outlook that suggests speed, movement and transition of capital and goods, and, of course, of ‘entrepreneurial’, high-flying people as well. It should then not come as too much of a surprise that in most cases such regeneration projects have succeeded in attracting a particular kind of resident, to the detriment and, indeed, exclusion of others. Researchers such as Malcolm Miles (1997) for example have been able to argue and demonstrate how regeneration projects, public artworks included, have, nearly always, resulted in processes of gentrification whereby the original residents found they were no longer able to afford the cost of living in the newly regenerated areas, and were consequently forced to move elsewhere more ‘cheap’. Urban regeneration, in other words, very often boils down to the twin dynamics of gentrification here but exclusion and concentration of deprivation over there.

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The quite paradoxical predominance of ‘non-place’ style aesthetics (dixit Augé again) in urban regeneration does not however preclude the use and emplacement, in thus restyled areas, of more ‘site-specific’ public artworks. Many of those have seen the light in the course of the last few decades. The term ‘site-specific’ in the literature (e.g. Kwon 1997) is often used to denote works of art that purport to establish or express a particular connection with the locality in which they are placed. Such works of art may, for example, hint at the area’s bygone industrial past, or at recent and current events or developments, or perhaps also at that which the developers think, or wish, the future holds. To some extent, such artworks always also project images of what the commissioners and artists believe the local ‘community’, or local ‘identity’, or indeed the local ‘sense of place’ was, is or shall be about. We will revisit this theme later. The phrase ‘site-specific’ though may also just refer to the developers’ or the artist’s intention to merely take into account the aesthetic make-up of a particular locality, or, slightly more controversially, to deliberately confront and unsettle local functionalities or sensibilities. Richard Serra’s minimalist sculpture Tilted Arc was a case in point (see e.g. Levine 2002). Serra was commissioned by the US Art-inArchitecture programme to build a work destined for the Federal Plaza in Manhattan. The work was completed and placed in situ in 1979. It consisted of a Cor-Ten steel plate, slightly curved, and slightly tilted, about 120 ft long, and 12 ft high. It blocked the view of users of the plaza and, many claimed, it also hindered the flow of pedestrian traffic. The sculptor, Serra, maintained that the sculpture was an artistic and therefore highly critical and necessarily unpopular comment on and indictment of what he believed to be the unacceptably dominant functionalities of capital and government that were all too visible in the glass-and-concrete office buildings that towered over the area. After a long and protracted legal battle, initiated and spearheaded by members of the local legal community, the artwork was ultimately removed in 1989. Once could say that Serra, the critical censurer of censurers, was ultimately censured himself, and quite drastically so. The calamitous Serra case sparked a whole new debate in urban regeneration and public art studies and practice (see e.g. Beunders 2007; Clements 2008). Much in that debate focuses on the need for

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commissioners of public art and town planners to seriously engage with local residents, or indeed with other potential users of the particular locality in question, on the issue of regeneration projects and plans for artworks in them. The debate, in other words, is largely about the level, or lack, of democratic engagement with or involvement of a variety of audiences or spectatorships in the process of production and consumption of public space and the works of public art therein. One of the most distinguished voices in this debate was and remains Rosalyn Deutsche, and it is to her work that we now turn. In her book Evictions (1996), Deutsche looks for inspiration in radical democratic theory (Claude Lefort’s writings in particular) to argue that public art can actually never be absolutely democratic. All public art, ultimately, comes with a process of ‘eviction’ whereby something (or, of course: someone) takes the stage (quite literally so in the case of public art), and something else (or again: others) have to leave, are excluded, indeed ‘evicted’. In radical democratic theory reference is often made to a ‘void’ or a gap that, dwelling at the heart and indeed at the source of human creativity, could never be blocked off or covered up or, once and for all, sutured tight. This notion of the void, it may be noted in passing, is itself based in earlier existentialist writings. The void could never be blocked off, or covered, precisely because it is what makes humanity human. The void stands for the ever-present human potential to creatively intervene in the world by changing it, by making it anew. This potential cannot be eradicated. If it were possible to completely destroy this potential, then we would have left the human condition. But this then of course means that anything that flows from the void in creative processes could never (except of course through the destruction of human creative potential as such) stop the void from just being a void, that is, a well from which the new will keep flowing. This is so not just because anything that flows from the void of creativity is bound to carry traces of its origins, but also, and more importantly so, because any such ‘thing’, any such product of creativity, is inevitably going to have specificity. It is, inevitably so, going to be something specific. It will have specific features and it will, therefore, in all its specificity, be incapable to cover, let alone block off, the infinity of the void whence it came. There is, radical democratic theory tells us, no such

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thing as absolute democracy. There is only a never ending, relentless sequence of specific attempts, or perhaps only gestures, at being democratic or at doing democracy. All these attempts and gestures however, without exception, achieve nothing more than a wavering, fleeting local pinprick in the infinite void whence they emerged, just long enough for the creative flow of the void to engulf them in the next surge of creative negation (to evoke existentialist language here). This then indeed means that absolute democracy, that is, democracy that achieves the final, ultimate, once-and-for-all kind of fixed outcome, is nothing but an impossible, illusory, pipedream. Anything that dares to present itself as a democratic outcome is nothing but the ‘eviction’ of an infinite number of alternative ones. All democratic achievement rests upon exclusion. All specific attempts at democratic resolution, in all their specificity, are nothing but temporary achievements whose specificity and (therefore) incapacity to grind the flow of humanity’s infinite creativity to an absolute democratic halt, shall be back, inexorably, to haunt them. All democratic presence rests upon democratic eviction. And so it is, according to Deutsche, for public art. Yes, power may express itself by shaping and bending physical space in particular ways, be they of the Augé, the Serra, or any other variety; and counter-power or resistance may do the same by all means at its disposal. Both though could never be absolutely democratic. There simply is and cannot be such a thing as absolute democracy. As much as dominant censures may succeed in occupying time and space (picture yourself a monumental work of art crystallising in a public square), they will open the potential for counter-censures to emerge and crystallise in turn. Neither the former, nor the latter, will be able to express ultimate, absolute, grindingto-a-halt democratic achievement. The former’s censures are bound to be superseded by the latter’s, and those in turn will be unable to hold back the tide of further, unrelenting and relentless flows of censure, however creative the shapes and forms those censures and counter-censures make take. There are artists who are very much aware of this. One of those is the French street artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest (see Delpire and PignonErnest 2010). Pignon-Ernest uses the most fleeting of materials (i.e. drawings on paper) to remind us of that which has been repressed,

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or indeed completely lost and forgotten, in all that we do, in our actions, and in how we live our lives. Pignon-Ernest’s site-specific artwork usually consists of life-size black-on-white drawings which he glues onto walls of ruined or derelict neighbourhoods, or pavements, and which remind the passers-by of who and what had to be forgotten or repressed, in the process that also led to the specificity of the particular location referred to by his drawings. Pignon-Ernest is not inspired by radical democratic theory. In fact, his source of inspiration seems to be the work of the French philosopher George Bataille (on this connection, see Lippens 2017b). Bataille (e.g. 1957) is the philosopher of ‘continuous life’, that is, life before and beyond the functional strictures (i.e. ‘discontinuous life’) of what most would call civilisation. All civilisation is nothing but a bundle of civilised strictures and functionalities. Any ‘civilization’ is nothing but a specifically coded form and shape of elements from the stream of pure potential—i.e. the erotic, bodily, un-coded, fleshy potential—whence it emerged. Bataille’s attention and focus, and therefore also Ernest Pignon’s, is drawn towards this primordial, as-yet-un-coded life potential, that is, that which is repressed, and which has to be repressed if anything specific, anything specifically functional, is to emerge and crystallise. Censure is counter-censure. Counter-censure is censure. That should not come as too much of a surprise. We have not gone through decades of utter deconstruction for us to now shiver in the face of the abyss of what have become banal insights such as this one. The question now arises though, how does censure work? In the remainder of this essay, we will focus on one aspect of this problem by asking ourselves the following questions: How does censure take to the stage? How does it materialise? How does it take form and shape? How does it occupy space? How does it make sense?

Public Art and Experience It is worth reminding ourselves of the work of the post-war French philosopher and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In a remarkable attempt to combine insights from vitalist philosophy on the one

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hand and existentialism and phenomenology on the other, MerleauPonty, particularly in his posthumously published book The Visible and the Invisible (1964), stresses the importance of the body, and of bodily experience. However ‘abstract’ or ‘rational’ our conceptualised relations and interactions with the world may be, they are firmly rooted, inevitably so, in our bodily experience. It is through our bodies that we know the world. If we didn’t have bodies we wouldn’t be able to relate to the world, experience it, let alone ‘know’ it. We first experience the world. Only then do we conceptualise it, but those conceptualisations are themselves nothing but particular forms—i.e. human forms—of experience. Life, and that of course firmly includes human life, is a matter of experience through and through. Experience itself takes place in and through the body. It is a matter of the body, through and through. But although this means that we could never engage with the world without our bodies, it also means that (our bodies being the way that they are, and not otherwise) our engagements with the world always are specific, restricted, limited, constrained. And so will be the conceptualised ‘knowledge’ of it that, generated in and through the body, gradually effervesces out of our bodily experience of the world. Even those effervescences, i.e. those conceptualisations themselves, carry within them traces of their origins, as, at their very depths, they thrive largely on metaphorical images that in turn have their roots in bodily experience (on this, see Lakoff and Johnson 1999). If it is indeed the case that, as we saw, a public artwork is a specific crystallisation of creative energy that at some point takes a worldly shape and form, then at some point it is bound to be experienced by all living bodies that cross its space. The experience of a work of art is, first and foremost, sensory experience, that is, bodily experience. By that we really mean, here, bodily experience, or what phenomenologists such as Eugene Gendlin (1962) have termed ‘felt sense’. This felt sense is the bodily sensation that we experience in particular situations. Bodies cannot be without ‘felt sense’. One could do the test: even when trying to ‘sense’ nothing at all, there will still be this diffuse, slightly buzzing sensation that radiates outward from the region in the body that we know as the diaphragm. Whenever the body engages with the world—and that it does during every waking second of its life—there

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will be ‘felt  sense’. This felt sense is pre-conceptual and pre-reflective, but it will always be there. We may of course, in particular instances of experience, make attempts to adequately describe this felt sense through capturing it by any of the metaphorical images, or indeed conceptualisations, that will come effervescing out of the very experience itself. But an easy ‘fit’ between ‘felt sense’ on the one hand and metaphorical or conceptual capture is by no means guaranteed. Language can only achieve so much. Language is notoriously inadequate when it comes to capturing experience. There always is a formidable remainder, an inexhaustible ‘more’ in experience that, quite simply, eludes all language. To evoke an image which we used in the previous section when we discussed radical democracy: language is just a collection of specifically coded little pinpricks emerging from the infinite ocean of experience which they in turn will form part of, but which in no way they will be able to fully and completely grasp. Gendlin (e.g. 1981) calls such deliberate attempts at grasping experience through metaphorical exploration ‘focussing’. Theorists of aesthetics and visual art such as Nicholas Davey (2005) have, since, written about the inevitable and enduring ‘friction’ between our visceral experience of the world, and the artistic objects in it, and the linguistic ‘fictions’ that they generate. This f(r)ictional process, according to Davey, is never ending even though, at particular points in the process, as Gendlin suggests, there may be something of a bodily embedded recognition of a particular metaphorical or linguistic expression. But any such points of recognition—being fully part of the experience itself—will only take the experience itself forward, on a road to ever-more further moments of f(r)iction and continuing attempts at metaphorical grasping. As we have said before, works of public art (pretty much like anything else) emerge from an ocean of un-coded potential, and appear as coded specificities, plain for all who cross its space to see, indeed to ‘sense’. Their impact will be, first and foremost, sensory. This does of course not mean that the sensory experience by all recipients of public art, each with their own individual life trajectories, will be identical, or even that their experience will be anything like intended by the creators of the works of art. This has of course been recognised by a number of authors in the field of public art studies (e.g. Joy and Sherry

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2003; Belfiore and Bennett 2007; Hawkins 2012). But, that said, there is something about bodily experience that makes it, at the very basic depth, at least partially shareable. We, human beings, have, after all, similar bodies. One may perhaps be allowed to harbour hopes that, if only we went deep enough, as deep as the very core of raw, uncooked (dixit Levi-Strauss) primordial human bodily experience itself, bypassing all conception and ‘rational’ reflection, we might be able to reach the level of shared experience. We shall return to this issue in the next section. For now let us just say that the public work of art, once materialised in public space, will have taken up space. It is there. It can no longer be denied. It impacts on our bodies whenever we approach it. It is not explicitly censorious. In fact, more often than not, it only purports to project a positive image. But in merely taking stage, it also excludes, inevitably so. Evoking existentialist language: it negates what was there before. It negates, however temporarily, that which is not there. It negates that which it is incompatible with. It makes us feel this, but not that. It makes our bodies—indeed, it makes us—generate these images, not those. In the introduction, we mentioned Nathan Moore’s notion of ‘iconic control’. We now need to explore what this means in the field of public art. How do public works of art, how does image, how do icons, how does bodily experience, in this age of ours that has moved so far beyond language, way beyond conceptual reason and reflection, actually ‘control’? How in effect does censure, in this age of ours, take place, and how does it make sense? How does it send out messages about how to be and how not to be?

Public Art and Territorial Coding Art is usually not gratuitous. Art that is somehow arranged, in particular, will have its explicit or implicit aims and goals. Art that is arranged in museums, for example, does and museums as such have been called ‘civic laboratories’ through which attempts are made to contribute to the ‘governance of the social’ (Bennett 2005). This applies to public

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art emplacements as well. Both commissioners and artists will quite often have explicit views about what it is that they want the artworks to achieve, be it the creation of a ‘sense of place’, or ‘community cohesion’, or the construction of a new cultural ‘identity’. One could rephrase this. Works of public art are often meant to code the territory in which they appear, and that surrounds them. Such coding always and inevitably involves the projection, around the artwork, of a moral atmosphere, or universe. The work, as it were, embodies and radiates outward particular ways of being. In a way the artwork will always somehow carry, within it, a code that says: ‘This is who we are. This is how we should be, and this is how, actually, we’ve always been. And this is how you too should be’. But, and this should now have become clear, any such coded message, however subtly shaped in the forms and matter of the work of art, also comes with its corollary, i.e. a message, or messages, implicit mostly, about how not to be. The work of art, radiating out its code, or its codes, is always already censorious. To say that works of public art tend to radiate outward ways of being, whilst subtly censuring others, does of course not mean to say that such territorial coding will always be successful. Some works of art, as the Serra case tells us, have failed spectacularly and have even led to popular revolt. Whatever codes those artworks’ material bodies had been projecting around them they did not resonate with the ones that were alive in the bodies that crossed their space. In some cases both sets of embodied codes were extremely antagonistic, and resulted in the physical destruction of the work of art. In the remainder of this section we will explore two works of public art, one ‘successful’, and one that was ultimately destroyed (for more intricately detailed analyses of both works of art, see Lippens 2017a, c). The first is the well-known Angel of the North at Gateshead. Standing 60 feet tall on a mound filled with the detritus of the local manufacturing industry that collapsed a few decades before it was erected in 1998, Antony Gormley’s Angel has something of a phoenix about it. Arising from the ashes of a bygone past the Angel however still has firm roots in that very past. Phoenix-like though, the Angel also reaches out into the clear blue sky, and has its eye on the future. The Angel’s massive exoskeleton of thick weathering steel suggests enormous force. The Angel

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is, like the blast furnaces whence it emerged, a force of nature. But on the other hand the delicate curves of its body also suggest femininity, or at least androgynous tendencies (it is, after all, an Angel…). Its wings spread out, the Angel seems to be protecting its territory, and the living bodies therein, against danger. But no sooner have we recognised it as a protecting sentinel who is willing to unleash unimaginable force should necessity so require, than we realise that the Angel’s posture is also, at the very same time, one of welcome: the Angel is also welcoming us, and possibly even beckoning us to join it, to walk its territory and to meet its living bodies. The Angel uses its wings to send out the messages that well up from its very deep roots, to the outside world. But it also receives messages back, which it relays back, through its steady foundational roots, to its territory and to the living, breathing bodies that share its space. This Angel is connected, not just with its locality and all that takes place in it, but with the wider world as well. The Angel is a conduit for connection. The Angel’s territorial code seems to go as follows: ‘Here we live lives of multiplicity and connection. We invite you to do the same’. The censorious side of this code, then, could perhaps be worded like this: ‘We warn and protect against one-dimensionality and separation’. At first reactions to the Angel were at best mixed, particularly during its construction stage. Once completed though most of the criticism gradually died down. The Angel made sense. The code, or codes, embodied in its shape and forms, began to resonate with a multiplicity of codes in the living and breathing bodies of those who, upon entering its space, came to recognise and sense their own ways of being, their own histories and biographies, their own hopes and aspirations, in those of the colossal Angel. There are works of public art that have fared less well. In 2003, Raymond Mason’s sculpture Forward! (with exclamation mark) was set on fire on the spot—Centenary Square in Birmingham—where it had been standing since 1991 (see also Hall 1997). It was emplaced there and then as part of the regeneration project that aimed at restyling Birmingham’s city centre. Experts agree that, although the work was made of a type of resin, it must have taken the arsonists quite some effort to set it ablaze. Forward! was an oblong-shaped slab of

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resin, mostly yellow in colour, on which the industrial past of the city was depicted. At the back of the slab Mason had sculpted manufactories (billowing clouds of smoke included) and scenes with working men and artisans. Nearer to the front there were family scenes, ending in a scene with a family member confidently greeting the future as well as anyone who would have positioned themselves in front of the statue, by waving a raised arm and hand. The statue never attracted warm feelings from local residents during its lifetime. Indeed it was dismissively dubbed ‘The Lurpak’ because of its hue and slab-like appearance. It was also criticised by some who felt that elements in the statue (the greeting family at the front in particular) had something of socialist realism about them—an aesthetical faux pas that seemed well out of touch with the times. One of the first things noticed when approaching the sculpture must have been its strict linearity. As said, Forward! was an oblong-shaped slab. It had only one direction of travel. There was no escape, and there was no room for manoeuvre. Detours or improvisation were impossible. The statue roots the future direction of travel in a fixed past, and leaves only one road to the future. That single road is firmly, inescapably even, determined by the past. In addition, Forward! actually also commands those who cross its space to follow that one particular road (remember the exclamation mark). The viewer, in other words, is given his specific, detailed marching orders. The territorial code, or codes, embodied in the statue seemed to be saying: ‘We are the ones whose past is in our future. We live our lives, as indeed you should too, according to prestructured plan, logic and direction’. Its censorious aspect was one that probably said something like this: ‘Never stray from the path that has been laid out for you’. In a city that counts as one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse in Europe, and in an age of what has been called de-traditionalisation, when many were beginning to crave some measure of sovereign dominion over their own individual life trajectories, Mason’s unidirectional Forward! made very little sense. Its codes did not resonate with those in the bodies that crossed its space. Many an aspiring sovereign must have looked at the sculpture with something like bewilderment, or possibly even contempt, until some fatal day in 2003 it was set on fire.

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Conclusion: Towards a Sensory Criminology? Saying that language could never really get to grips with experience has become a truism. Experience—bodily experience—will always elude, at least to a very significant extent, the clutches of language. And yet, a focus on experience is still not commonplace in social research and writing. We need to qualify this statement though. In some areas of the social sciences or related fields of research, quite significant progress has been made (e.g. in the more applied disciplines such as nursing, social care or psychotherapy), but, it should be admitted, less so in others, including criminology. That said though, we have seen the birth of what is known as visual criminology and in some corners of cultural criminology some attention is being paid to the role and place of bodily experience in human relations and human interactions. In this chapter, an attempt was made to contribute to this body of literature. The irony implicit in this attempt does not escape us. We are indeed using language to illustrate the point that language is very often too feeble, too powerless, to fully make sense of experience. However, we also recognise that, although language may never be able to exhaust its bodily origins, it is fully part of human experience, and cannot but carry traces of its origins within it. In other words, traces of the fullness of experience will shine through in language, particularly in metaphor. And so, somehow it does make sense to talk or write about experience, i.e. about sense. The aim of this contribution was to demonstrate how social censure (dixit Colin Sumner) does not operate purely through language. Commands, orders, directions, prohibitions, and so on, don’t just do their work through the vehicle of language (‘Don’t do that! Do this!’ or ‘Don’t be like this! Be like that!’). They also achieve outcomes, very often quite subtly so, through the senses, through the body, through sensory experience. In an age when the weakness of language has been recognised by many, control and censure are also attempted in more subtle ways. We have (to evoke Nathan Moore’s phrase once again) arrived in an age of ‘iconic control’. Control, and therefore censure as well, take place ever more in and through the distribution and circulation of iconic images. In other words: through sensory experience,

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or, why not, through sensure. In this contribution, we aimed to illustrate this with examples taken from public art and urban regeneration studies. Works of public art do sometimes contribute to achieving successful ‘iconic control’, on condition that the attempts at territorial coding embodied in their forms and shapes somehow resonate with those in the living, breathing bodies that cross their space.

Coda We hope to have been able to thus contribute to what might perhaps be called sensory criminology. In a recent paper, Sumner has convincingly argued for criminology to adopt a critical realist perspective (Sumner 2015). In this perspective, the issue is to connect ‘surface manifestations of phenomena’ to their ‘generative mechanisms’ (2015, 198) without losing sight of the multiple ‘layers of determination’, each with their ‘own relatively autonomous dialectics’ (2015, 207). A sensory criminology that has an eye—or sense, to be precise—for the role and place of bodily experience and bodily generation, in human life, could fit very well within such a perspective. Focussing on how the body (and the senses in particular) are implied in the generation, transmission and experience of censure, such a criminology would be focussing on what Sumner, elsewhere in his paper, calls ‘bridges’ in human relations and interaction. Such bridges, ‘the very foundations of critical realist knowledge in social science’, include a variety of ‘forms of sentience’ (2015, 198) that cannot be discarded or ignored by anyone who wishes to understand how censures and counter-censures emerge and dissipate. Sumner himself has always been aware of this. He might be the original sensory criminologist.

References Augé, M. (2009). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso. Bataille, G. (2001) [1957]. Eroticism. London: Penguin.

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Belfiore, E., & Bennett, O. (2007). Determinants of impact: Towards a better understanding of encounters with the arts. Cultural Trends, 16(3), 225–275. Bennett, T. (2005). Civic laboratories: Museums, cultural objecthood and the governance of the social. Cultural Studies, 19(5), 521–547. Beunders, H. (2007). The end of arrogance, the advent of persuasion. Public art in a multicultural society. Social Analysis, 51(1), 42–57. Clements, P. (2008). Public art: Radical, functional or democratic methodologies? Journal of Visual Arts Practice, 7(1), 19–35. Davey, N. (2005). Aesthetic f(r)iction: The conflicts of visual experience. Journal of Visual Art Practice, 4(2–3), 135–149. Delpire, E., & Pignon-Ernest, E. (2010). Face aux murs: Ernest Pignon-Ernest. Paris: Delpire. Deutsche, R. (1996). Evictions. Art and spatial politics. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Gendlin, E. (1962). Experiencing and the creation of meaning: A philosophical and psychological approach to the subjective. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Gendlin, E. (1981). Focussing. New York: Bantam Books. Hall, T. (1997). Images of industry in the post-industrial city: Raymond Mason and Birmingham. Cultural Geographies, 4, 46–68. Harvey, A. (2014). Walking, drawing, indexing: Representing bodily experience of landscape. Nano, 6, at http://www.nanocrit.com/issues/6-2014/. Hawkins, H. (2012). Geography and art. An expanding field: Site, the body and practice. Progress in Human Geography, 37(1), 52–71. Hubbard, P. (1996). Urban design and city regeneration: Social representations of entrepreneurial landscapes. Urban Studies, 33(8), 1441–1461. Joy, A., & Sherry, J. F. (2003). Speaking of art as embodied imagination: A multisensory approach to understanding aesthetic experience. Journal of Consumer Research, 30, 259–282. Kwon, M. (1997). One place after another: Notes on site specificity. October, 80, 85–110. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh. New York: Basic Books. Levine, C. (2002). The paradox of public art: Democratic space, the avantgarde, and Richard Serra’s ‘tilted arc’. Philosophy & Geography, 5(1), 51–68. Lippens, R. (2017a). Forward! Coding, de-coding and re-coding law in public art. In A. Amatrudo & R. Rauxloh (Eds.), Law in popular belief: Myth and reality. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Lippens, R. (2017b). Territorial coding in street art and censure: Ernest PignonErnest’s contribution to visual criminology. In E. Carrabine & M. Brown (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of visual criminology. London: Routledge. Lippens, R. (2017c). Angels, warriors and beacons. Totemic law, territorial coding and monumental sculpture in post-Industrial landscapes. Semiotica. Forthcoming. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) [1964]. The visible and the invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Miles, M. (1997). Art, space and the city. Routledge: Public art and urban futures. London. Moore, N. (2007). Icons of control: Deleuze, signs, law. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 20, 33–54. Selwood, S. (1995). The benefits of public art. The polemics of permanent art in public places. Policy Studies Institute: London. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (1990). Censure, politics and criminal justice. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (2001). Social censure. In E. McLaughlin & J. Muncie (Eds.), The Sage dictionary of criminology. London: Sage. Sumner, C. (2015). Critical realism, overdetermination and social censure. In R. Lippens & D. Crewe (Eds.), What is criminology about? Philosophical reflections. Abingdon: Routledge.

Author Biography Ronnie Lippens  is Professor of Criminology at Keele University. His research interests include critical criminology and organizational criminology, but latterly they have focused also on the imaginary of justice, law and order, as expressed in, e.g., novels and paintings. This involves the study and analysis of art and literature. He has published numerous contributions (in Dutch as well as in English) on those topics in a wide variety of venues. He is currently working on a closer analysis of the emergence of forms of governance in what could be called prophetic art, painting and sculpture in particular.

Normativity and the Ontology of Being Glyn Williams and Gruffudd Williams

Introduction Modernity equates with the Enlightenment and how the principles of science established reason as the primary component of life, rejecting the transcendental as a guiding force. This faith in reason was the dominant principle of the early social sciences that developed along specific lines whether these involved, positivism, functionalism or idealism. The polemic between the Hegelians and the Young Hegelians, between Marx and Condorcet stand out as struggles over how reason was deployed to sustain what they understood as politically charged discourses, generating a split between consensus and conflict G. Williams (*)  Bangor, UK e-mail: [email protected] G. Williams  London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 A. Amatrudo (ed.), Social Censure and Critical Criminology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95221-2_13

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perspectives. The radicals objected to how reason was deployed, yet subscribed to many of the same principles. It was the persistence of many of these principles that eventually resulted in a virulent critique of Marxism. Objections to the rationalist principles in Enlightenment thinking extended beyond idealism and materialism. Nietzsche, Heidegaar, Wittgenstein and perhaps Horkheimer and Gramsci questioned the grounding of Enlightenment thinking in an objective science, and laid the basis for what became known as the linguistic turn and post-structuralism. During the 1960s and 1970s sociology was transformed. Structural functionalism was side-lined, new fields such as ethnomethodlogy emerged, and the work of Heediegger, Wittgenstein and Husserl had an influence. Marxism was given a new lease of life fuelled, in part, by the translation of Gramsci’s work into French and English. The most radical developments involved the challenging of the orthodox meta-narratives of sociology by a series of French writers. The centered rational subject of Enlightenment thought was decentered and language was brought into social theory. This was the context within which Sumner wrote his influential Reading Ideologies. Discovering a method for ‘reading ideologies’ was a primary concern. Below, we focus on issues and orientations that Sumner did not consider when writing Reading Ideologies. Sumner’s book (Sumner 1979) spans the radical and the orthodox positions, being a quest for a method to unravel the processes of ideological formation and constitution. ‘Reading’ suggests a form of analysis in terms of putting the reader or analyst in the place that a subject’s discourse emanates from, and recognising what can and cannot be said from that place. Sumner operates by reference to epistemological principles, while offering a critique of epistemology by treating knowledge as a product of practice, and rejecting any transcendental sense of epistemology. It contrasts with how orthodox methodology links theory, concepts and measurement or conceptual implementation in a claim for the existence of a reality independent of discourse that can be discovered, integrating truth and reality where truth is the correspondence of thought and reality. Thought is formally and materially separated from truth.

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‘Reading’ is also understood as how sociological theory strives to ‘read’ the social world. Sumner (1979: 63) narrows his understanding of ‘reading’ as a ‘practice within which we become aware of significance, or meaning, in social phenomenon.’ It involves neither description nor explanation, but retains reference to the social. The post-structuralism discussed below makes no claim about discovering truth, the focus shifting to the study of meaning and how ambiguity is resolved in the construction of meaning, the possibilities of meaning and the effects of meaning. It focuses upon techniques that highlight the issues inherent in the construction of meaning. An engagement with linguistics is essential. Orthodox linguistics shifts the emphasis away from the enonce1 per se to the situation, viewing language as a system of reparable forms that are directly linked to social action. Rational individuals determine meaning through selection from among different possibilities, aided by the form of language and its relationship to standardisation as a human process. Much of what follows focuses on the linguistic turn and the decentring of the subject, rejecting the reliance of epistemology on the centered, rational human subject, fully in control of their rational basis, being responsible, in one way or another, for forging their own destiny. The social sciences are closed to social, psychological, economic and other processes that now are facts of language practice which are only put into operation across the symbolic and formal processes of language. Knowledge is no longer the correct representation of an independent reality while truth and reality are nebulous.

Language and Ideology Reading Ideology drew on Althusser’s Marxist problematic, and the link to Canguilhem (1966) and Bachelard (1972) which challenged the objective claims of science. Althusser’s anti-humanism differed from Gramsci’s class subjectivity and drew on the work of Lacan (1966). Each social formation was understood as a complex structured totality of distinct instances—economic, political and ideological, each with its

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own internal logic, none of which asserted a persistent determination, despite the economic instant being determinant ‘in the last instance’, thus avoiding the problem of economic determinism. This overcame how the superstructure served the interests of the infrastructure, and how order and change derive from the same conditions. A universal rationality replaces the rationality of the individual. Treating the superstructure as potentially independent of the infrastructure meant that social order derived from a coercion that relied upon consensus. Over-determination involved situations wherein one of the instances determined the other, allowing Althusser to propose the relative autonomy of the politico–ideological superstructure, each instance having its own internal logic irreducible to any other, appraised according to its own internal validity. Theory, including Marxist theory, was autonomous. The problematic involves incompatible theoretical schemes in a single text, referring to what underlies and determines the questions and answers given in any text. This opened the way to the notion of reading and a distinctive technique of textual analysis. Althusser’s ‘reading’ denies the empirical epistemology wherein the meaning of a text is immediately accessible to the reader. As a thought process with its own laws that have no reference to the real process of society or history, theory has its own autonomy independent of social interests and superstructure. Knowledge takes place entirely in thought. The thought-object of a discourse must be distinguished from its truth-object. As a consequence of the variable determinism of the different moments, any illusion that derives from their effects derives from how they are read. Texts resemble dreams, having a manifest content while their latent content is concealed. The problematic, or the system of questions underlying the surface discourse of a text, is wrested from a text’s grasp and silences via a theoretically informed reading. Althusser argued that individuals are merely the bearers or supports of the prevailing relations of production. Thus, they are incapable of initiating action. The category of subject misleads us about the real nature of individual human beings, and plays a role in the structure of ideological misrecognition, individuals are apprenticed for support

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roles by subsuming them in the form of subjects: ‘The category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of “constituting” concrete individuals as subjects.’ (Althusser 1971: 159). Ideology interpolates individuals as the subjects of discourse that think of themselves as independent agents for whom ‘reality’ actually exists, a critique of how Enlightenment thinking stressed the centered, rational subject, fully in charge of their destiny and capable of engaging directly with truth and reality. Althusser (1965: 235) states: ‘men are formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence.’ Practice itself is mystified, and ideology rests in the subject/object relationship. This relates to Spinoza’s (Nadler 2001) distinction between knowledge of imagination and a knowledge that derives from concepts of ideas that are theoretically elaborated. It invokes a suspicion of language and its role in revealing reality: ‘Ideology (as a system of mass representations) is indispensable in any society if man is to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence.’ (Althusser 1968: 233). Ideology constitutes individuals as subjects. The subject cannot pre-exist ideology, and is not constituted before the act. Ideology is a feature of social practice, or the system of representation through which people live out their relationship to the historical world, and involves how subjects are constructed in relation to one another and to a range of objects. It actualizes the subject’s recognition of itself as a subject, as a feature of common sense. It serves as the cement of society. Similarly, Nietzsche (1969) referred to human action as a form of fiction on account of how it presumed the existence of a pre-formed, autonomous, rational human agent capable of operating on firmly grounded beliefs and assumptions in a rational way. The subsequent incompatibility of action and reflection means that the ‘true’ conditions of existence are excluded from consciousness at the point of action. The transformation of an individual into a subject occurs only as a result of a repression of the forces responsible for making it. There is a misrecognition of the self as a consequence of the ‘imaginary’ dimensions of human existence. Through ideology society interpolates the individual, creating the illusion that society cannot exist without it.

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Knowledge involves the relationship between discourse and the construction of meaning: ‘The meaning of words is not fixed by their ordinary usage but by the relation between theoretical concepts within a conceptual system. It is these relations that assign meaning to words, designating concepts, their theoretical meaning.’ (Althusser 1968: 56). The task of elaborating a method to coincide with his theoretical developments, was undertaken by one of his students, Michel Pecheux, who focused the relationship between semantics and language use (Pecheux 1975). Pecheux’s early work involved ideology, and the relationship between normativity and the taken for granted or common sense, a la Gramnsci. Once the conspiratorial nature of ideology was resolved, ideology was equated with social practices that do not require the intervention of the central, rational, human subject. Ideology as a totalizing, determining, force no longer requires recourse to the principles of modernity. No longer a prefigured, rational construct that predates the act, ideology becomes the effect of discourse. What is retained is Althusser’s form of Marxism. Pecheux’s focus on language involved linking Althusser’s antihumanism with Saussurean linguistics. Saussure (1972) rejected how a word was understood as a representation of an object that already existed outside of language to which it refers. Hitherto, language was merely a gloss on what exists outside of discourse. The mind mediates between the world external to language and the spoken word, leading to a claim for a structure of representation wherein ideas are the signs of things, and words the signs of ideas. As a rational being, fully in control of their consciousness, the human subject assigns meanings to words and ensures their correct usage, guaranteeing the relationship between language and the real world. Saussure argued that the linguistic sign united not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sign–image. Signification, or the production of meaningful enonciations, consists of the relationship between the signifier and the signified. Things and words remained distinct, but the relationship between them now rested on signification or how meaningful utterances are produced.

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The sounds produced are the signifiers, while the concepts that can be combined, signify. They are not separate since both are created in a sign, language is separate from reality while being the bond between sound and idea. Differences between words allow them to signify. The parallel structures of signifiers and signified, or sounds and concepts, words and things, rely on difference. Language becomes an autonomous system, there is nothing outside of the system of language that is relevant to its description. Langue is a homogeneous and collective phenomenon, while parole is active, individual and heterogeneous. Linguistics is now part of a semiology, revealing what constitutes signs and the laws that govern them. Signs differ from symbols, while the bond between signifier and signified means that symbols are not arbitrary. The equilibrium of sign as a system is assured by social functioning. Suppressing the relationship between ‘thing’ and ‘word’ of traditional language philosophy, Saussure rejected the prior relationship between agency and the production of meaning where an always already world waits to be designated by the use of language. Different languages divide up reality in different ways, and the relationship between signified and signifier is tied to a community that is bound to a particular language. It is independent of the will of the speaker, and is subject to constant change, the sign and meaning are arbitrary. As a structuralist, Benveniste (1966) extended the work of Saussure from a focus on system to that of structure. The subject involved a link between langue as a system of signs, and langue as an instrument of communication put into action through enonciation. As a system of signs langue was linked with the linguistics of discourse, the speaking subject being master of their speech, the system of which is analyzed as a system of traces of enonciation found in linguistically analyzable enonciations. The speaking subject as the subject of enonciation countered Saussure’s limited interest in parole. Language was not merely a system of signs, but was also a means of communication where the expression is discourse. Benveniste distinguished between meaning and reference or designation at the interior of the process of signification. This was the basis of Althusser’s notion of the interpolation of the subject through signification, and its

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implications for decentering. Meaning involves the relationship between signs and references within a theory of enonciation. Husserl’s phenomenology led to Saussure’s language as a system being replaced by structure, and eventually to a reference to structuralism. Considerable work was necessary in order to disarticulate Benveniste’s theory of enonciation from the Husserlean influence so that it could link with decentering. Pecheux’s theory of the subjective illusion of la parole was the key that linked the linguistic work of enonciative linguistics with Foucault’s work on the normative.

Post-structuralism Pecheux had revised several of Foucault’s notions, including discursive formation, the order of discourse, the order of things, etc., to conform to Althussere’s Marxist problematic. Discursive formations consist of statements that refer to one and the same object within a dispersion of statements with a regularity, involving how statements contribute to discourse as the practice that systematically forms the object about which they speak (Foucault 1969). Regularity involves statements that produce identical objects. Consequently, discourses are practices that systematically form the objects about which they were speak. Enonciative modalities clarifies how the statements of a discursive formation are made in terms of who has the right to speak, the place in terms of power from which they speak and what position in terms of discourse the subject occupies, and must occupy, in order to be the subject. Pecheux argued that words, phrases, etc., change their meaning according to the position held by them—involving a conjuncture determined by a state of class struggle, and an ideological and political ‘position’, in that conjuncture. A discursive formation determines what can and must be said from a position. As part of ideology, meaning does not involve purely linguistic properties. The struggle over meaning is part of the class struggle. Furthermore, an ideological formation consists of a series of discursive formations. Again it builds on Althusser’s work, involving attitudes, representations, etc., related to class positions. There

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is an overlap between the notion of ideological formation and work on the articulation of modes of production, and the relation to a social formation. Signification attributes places and identification to subjects from a specific point of view, a mechanism of differential identification that transmits the social effect. The notion of interpolation was revised in terms of how the constitution of individuals as subjects involves a recognition of other subjects through the discursive formation. The subject as the assumed source of meaning is carried, without rendering account, to identify with the discursive formation. The discursive formation endows words with a meaning that changes in passing from one discursive formation to another. The inter-discursive, or how different discursive formations relate to one another, also intervenes. How words change their meaning according to the position from which they are employed relates to the notion of place, which derives from how subject positions involve a social topography of speaking subjects. Thus, within the medical discourse a medical ‘doctor’ is a subject position that speaks from a specific place, institutionalized by the existing rules of medical discourse within which the doctor is constituted via a particular configuration of enonciative modalities and subject positions. As the function of the statement, the subject is positioned as the source of origin of the statement and in relation to the subject addressed in particular ways, in determining what position can and must be occupied by any individual if they are to be the subject of a formulation qua statement. That is, discourse is understood as a practice. The normative is the modality of the object that gives truth-value to particular objects within particular configurations. References to the work of Foucault in Pecheux’s Les Verites de la Palice express admiration and a criticism for not pursuing Marxism, partly from conviction and partly due to a commitment to Althusser as master, as well as to the French Communist Party (PCF). When Pecheux left the PCF in the early 1980s the break with economism and rationality was complete. Ideology became the normative as the effects of discourse constructed out of the infinite possibilities of meaning. Conspiratorialism’s rational subject, the idea of a structure external to

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discourse, disappears, historical materialism and its link to inevitable progress all dissolve. By the early 1980s the primary influence on French Discourse Analysis (FDA) was Foucault’s post structuralism. Courtine (1981: 40) claims that FDA was an attempt to put ‘Foucault’s perspective to work’. Foucault’s work on enonciation stressed the regularity of the enonce rather than its originality, focusing on the novelty of the enonciative regime. FDA’s theoretical perspective conformed with much of the work of Foucault and Lacan, especially in how it has focused on the work of Culioli (1990) in establishing a decentered linguistics to accompany the philosophical problematic.

Enonciative Linguistics As early as the end of the 1960s Pecheux was working with Antoin Culioli (Culioli et al. 1970). Much of French linguistics focused upon grammatical and logical analysis, and on the principles of rhetoric, encompassing a form of behaviourism. Culioli drew on rhetoric, the work of Saussure and Benveniste and the relationship between syntax and semantics. The influence of Benveniste led to operating deictics within the Saussurean distinction of what is given as possible in speech, langue and the actual instance of it—parole. Husserl’s phenomenology emerges in the focus on deictics and enonciation, while rejecting the centered subject that it posits. Husserlean modernism and post-structuralism both derive from the trajectory of Christian ontotheology. Husserl (1970) merged the distinctive paths and, in so doing, made post-structuralism possible. Normativity, involved combining phenomenology with the a priori of Classicism which, in turn, was premised on mathesis. The break with evolutionism and the faith in progress questions modernism, and thereby, the normativity upon which it is based. Difference replaces progressive form. The debate around whether taking the ‘I’ and ‘you’ out of its modernist context is sufficient, or whether it is also necessary to consider reconceptualizing space and time which leads to their initial separation, revolves around the Classical concept of mathesis. It relates to how a

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method that supports a problematic that acknowledges change—either in the normative or in society—cannot draw upon the principles of a meta-discourse premised upon accounting for change while itself lying outside of any orthodox understanding of explanation. Pecheux saw that the discourse that was analyzed was not a linguistic object, but a socio-historic object subjected to an analysis using linguistics as a presupposed that was taken for granted. This led to the critique of orthodox syntax as behaviorist, involving a subjectivist conception of semantics that derived from a postulation of the independence of the syntactic and the semantic. It was an attempt to move away from a universal and a priori semantics. Pecheux’s theory of the subjective illusion of la parole led to linking the linguistic work of enonciative linguistics with Foucault’s work on the normative. Benveniste’s (1966: 259) ‘linguistics of parole’ gave primacy to communication, arguing that subjectivity was premised on the linguistic category of ‘person’: ‘It is in and through language that man is constituted as a subject because it is only language in reality that established the concept of “ego” in its reality which is that of being.’ He restricts the process of the subject to the constitutive operation of formal grammatical structures that he distinguished from discourse. The liberation of language from grammar involved Culioli’s enonciative linguistics. Enonciative linguistics is an alternative to an orthodox linguistics dominated by a concern with syntax. The linguistic subject, the generic subject and the subject of discourse are all different. The linguistic subject is presupposed rather than being the object of study. The generic subject is distinct since the individual is not interpolated in the discourse as subject, under the universal form of the subject of enonciation, but in a number of enonciative places which determine that a discursive sequence is a harangue, a sermon, etc. In enonciative linguistics the subject is the correlate of a destinataire, or a co-enonciateur to use Culioli’s term, and of a collection of retrievals in time and space. Statements are not simply fragments of natural language, but are samples of certain genres of discourse. These genres are akin to a series of speech-acts involving constrained enonciateurs. The discursive processes involve how subjects and objects are constituted in relation to the establishment of meaning. They involve

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demonstrating how what is assumed to be an essential ambiguity is resolved by the social construction of meaning as the effect of discourse. This involves showing the process whereby the infinite possibilities of language are resolved in interaction. Operationalizing enonciative linguistics involves ‘taking in charge’. Interpolation involves how a subject place opens up within the discourse so that the individual has the option of taking in charge or not taking in charge that subject position. If taking in charge, the individual is transformed into the subject of enonciation. This has consequences. Taking in charge validates the interaction involving taking in account, accepting, distanciation, refusal, etc. The relationship established between different subjects determines the legitimacy of each in relation to one another. As the subject of enonciation the individual is ‘supposed to take responsibility for the contents posed’, thereby becoming a subject who ‘takes up a position’ (Pecheux 1982: 156). The subject recognizes the right to exist within specific roles and relationships which carry status. It also legitimates the right to occupy a place and to speak from that place. Taking in charge allows an evaluation of the power of social categorization. It involves the collection of operations, whereby the actors differentiate the status of other actors as a function of the social relation that was established with them. We need to distinguish between the enonciatuer that takes part in the signification on the level of langue, and the locuteurs that pertain to meaning, in terms of the effective situation. There is a social interaction since the locuteurs, in taking in charge the enonce, establish between them the relationships that conform to those that the formal system of enonciation implies operates between the enonciateurs. It maps the spaces that involve the participants—that of the enonciateur with speaker, co-encoiateur with addressee, etc. While the participants take in charge, it also opens up analysis for the interpreter. Signification interpolates the individual as a subject, and thereby constitutes the meaning that supports an act of language. The overlap of the act of language and the enonciataire involves how the taking in charge of a statement fixes the deictic elements of time, person and place by using the marks of discourse, be they deicitic or the modalities. Whereas signification interpolates the enonciataire, this is not akin

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to fixing meaning, which is something that occurs in terms of the real effect wherein the enonciataire is transferred into a locuteur, or the real state of the enonciateur where a real social place is constituted. Social interaction involves the locuteurs taking in charge concrete verbal production, thereby opening up to a discursive exterior. The link between enonciation as a formal aspect, and the locuteur as a real social place, involves the unwinding of enonciation internal to discourse, and the social actions of which discourse is the support. Modalities relate to assertions where the truth is a product of enonication, of a process of validation constructing its guarantee by the enonciateur. Truth no longer has an independent stable property as in the modernist discourse. Among language acts, privilege tends to be accorded to assertion because it presents the enonce as true or false. Implicit in the act of assertion is a subject enonciateur who presents, and validates, their enonciation, and whose presence is inscribed in the marks of person and of tense, of mode of attachment to the verb. The form of deictics is a decentered version of that which is worked out by Benveniste, coupled with the positioning effect of discourse. These positions are marked through the personal pronouns I, you, we, whereas the third person pronouns, not belonging to the category of the first person, mark the objects that are spoken of. The speaking of objects by persons is discourse’s event, the moment of its, and therefore human being’s, instantiation. The apparatus of enonciation is made up of three coordinates—the category of person, the category of localization or place and the category of tense. The deictic shifters define the spatio-temporal coordinates implicit in the speech-act constructed around the relationship between I/you, here and now. They inscribe the enonces in space and time in relation to the enonciateur that is constituted as a reference point. This means that it is impossible to disassociate person from deictics. Every text has a zero point of origin, or reference for its enonciation, the ‘I-here-now’, and two kinds of operations, one designating an alternative enonciative position—‘you’ or ‘there’ or ‘then’—and the other kind of operation designating points outside the field of present enonciation—‘he’/‘it’ or ‘elsewhere’ or ‘once upon a time’. Each act of enonciation is made visible through a series of marks that can be analyzed.

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Modalities are the specific operators of enonciation, being the grammar of the clause that corresponds to the interpersonal function of language. The subject enonciateur is the zero point or point of origin of referential references—‘I’ indicates that the subject of the enonce is identical to the enonciateur—and of modalizations. All enonciations imply a certain ‘attitude’ of the enonciateur with reference to what is said. This is not an attitude of a centered subject, but an expression of a constant interaction involving the co-enonciateur. An enonce simultaneously plays on two linked registers—on the one hand it states something about something and, on the other hand, this relationship is made the object of a taking in charge by the enonciateur. We are unable to separate that which is said from how it is posed. Language is always a reflexive exercise involving the enonciateur in relation to language, involving an intuitive representation of subjective mechanisms adjacent to observable forms of meta-enonciative reflexivity. Modalities also carry a heterogeneous form that links the enonciateur with an exterior in the sense that a meta-enonciative ‘position’ of ‘distance’, ‘externality’, etc., by reference to words taken as objects, reveals an attempt to intuitively represent a subjective mechanism related to meta-enonciative reflexivity. It involves a heterogeneity involving how the enonciateur comments on his statement. It also involves the relationship between the subject and the production of meaning as something that is produced in interaction. This reference to heterogeneity involves the inter-discursive, or the complex interdependent configurations of discursive formations, giving the inter-discourse primacy over the constituent parts, and revealing properties that are not predictable from consideration of its parts. It involves a process of incessant pre-constructed elements produced outside of itself. Ambiguity derives from, among other things, the combination of discursive formations since the inter-discourse involves the fusion of prior and present discourses, and the reconstitution of meaning associated with this relationship. This makes discourse analysis an interpretive discipline. Thus the inter-discourse is the space where the objects that link to their intra-discourse, with the illusion of expressing ‘thoughts’ and of expressing things of an external world, are constituted and articulated. In so doing there is a ‘forgetting’ that this involves

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the ‘pre-constructed’ character of these elements. The inter-discourse is a modality of the discourse that traverses the enonciation of the subject. All discursive formations involve a memory in the sense of how the enonce is inscribed in the past. The objects of discourse are stabilized under the form of the pre-constructed. Similarly, at this level the instance of the universal subject intervenes as the place from where the subject can enonce. That is, the inter-discourse fixes that of which it speaks and the subject that it guarantees. In taking in charge the individual is transformed into the subject of discourse assuming specific relations, not only with other subjects, but also with a range of objects. Thus, Foucault (1969) refers to discourse as ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.’ The resultant constellation returns us to Althusser’s (1968) argument about how ideology resides in the subject/object relationship, albeit that the understanding of ideology is modified, involving Foucault’s argument about how objects are constituted and transformed in accordance with the rules of the discursive formation. They do not lie outside of discourse. As such they are objects of knowledge. This approach carries metaphysical assumptions: • It conceptualizes language as a potential that permits the formal apparatus of enonciation to appear, this form itself being subject to the discursive nature of linguistic science and the associated metaphysical assumptions. • It views the actual process of the resolution of an essential ambiguity of meaning as a social process in the sense that it involves some degree of interaction and resolution of ambiguity by protagonists. • It conceives of these subjects as preformed, existing before the act, but themselves as the effects of discourse. • It sees the social as the effects of discourse. Meaning is socially constituted and thereby activates the social. The social is more than mere interaction and, in contrast to ethnomethodology, this approach offers a comment, not merely on localized knowledge, but also on the world. Language is no longer referential, articulating language and some world external to the subject, but which

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that subject is part of, nor of articulating language with its subjects. The shift from orthodox linguistics to deictics and enonciative linguistics runs parallel to the decentering of the subject, and involves a shift from the person of grammar to the trilogy of time, space and person of deictics, but the link of decentering is not made explicit. Similarly, how inter-discourse influences the socio-historic space relating to the constitutive ambiguity of language and its existence as a system of differences, begs questions about the nature of the social. It pertains to the metaphysics of language and the issue of language as an object.

The Sociological Enonciative analysis describes enonciative places occupied by the enonciateur, and abstract rather than sociological situations. Sociology has focused upon regularities and how these regularities involve patterns of behaviour that are sustained over time as social practices. Among some of the inherent assumptions of sociology are the following: that social groups consist of individuals who share common characteristics; that there is one society within each nation state, with the regulating function of the state playing a role, through its institutions, in the structuring of society; that social structure involves a stability of social interaction; that the state constitutes a single community made up of several smaller scale communities, each of which is held together by a sense of common identity; that social order involves stability, a stability that is sustained through the role of law as a feature of moral regulation; and that society is a dynamic entity. How these assumptions, and other notions, figure in the different versions of sociology varies. However, normativity is a central concern of sociology. Post-structuralism maintains that the structural totality is always surrounded by an excess of meaning that it is unable to master; society, being a unitary and intelligible object that grounds its own partial processes, is an impossibility. The individual and collective subjects are artificial and hence last only in the moment of their constitution. Society is fragile. Our only access to the real world is through its construction as a discursive form within systems of representation. The best we can do

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is to consider how discourse and the subject and objects are stabilized. This would seem to condemn sociology to the realm of discourse such that its interpretive role is negated. Treating sociology as a meta-discourse implicates the sociologist in the process of construction by taking in charge the discourse of that which is being analyzed, thereby becoming part of the normalizing process. If there was no element of stability to the constitution of subjects and objects, communication and social practice would be difficult if not impossible. Furthermore, this stability crosses both subjects and objects and the variable relationship between them. Foucault refers to: ‘the system that regulates the appearance of enonces as singular events.’ Foucault’s work on enonciation was not concerned with the originality of the enonce but, rather, on the regularity of enonces. It sought to encounter the novelty of the enonciative regime itself. The focus in the form of the analysis discussed above (Williams 1999) is on the global, on a universalism of being, acknowledging the existence of a normative order that is locked in a constant process of change, understood as social change. However, a system that merely analyzes the nature of a discourse along with its effect is incapable of drawing upon a prefigured social for explanation. The focus upon changes in the effects of discourse does not seek to encompass any reference to causality in the modernist sense. Yet, viewing society as universal explains nothing, leaving society, as a feature of that universalism, itself to be explained. For Foucault, normalization and individualization occur to reproduce the social as the effect of discourse. This involves a shared meaning appearing as a central tenet of a world that subjects share in common, constructed out of norms that are recognized as legitimate. Such norms are essential as the basis for a shared meaning focusing upon the real social places that allow interaction to occur. It also accommodates a refusal to accept the taking in charge, but even here it would seem to imply some semblance of shared meaning. The norm becomes how the inter-discourse relates to the embedding or stabilization of discourse, focusing interaction so that the normative is conditioned in and through discourse. Change is accommodated when stabilization is broken by the destabilization of the pre-constructed that supports such

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stabilization, leading to its deconstruction, and to a realignment of the relationships between subjects and objects within the networks that they constitute. There is a close link between stabilization and normativity. The norm is not external to its field of application and the focus must be on its application, and how it thereby produces and reproduces itself. The question shifts to one of what it is that legitimates it. The problematic of Foucault’s work involved first, the relationship of the norm to its ‘objects’, that is, norm in its juridical sense, where a landmark or a boundary is established, or to a limit as in the case of the biological norm; and second, the relationship of the norm to its ‘subjects’ where certain subjects are excluded or integrated in how the norm separates or distinguishes. The norm can be negative and restrictive/divisive and relates to domination. It sets boundaries related to judgement about the merits of inclusion and exclusion. Normativity is treated as a discourse that not only sets boundaries in constructing subjects and objects in relation to each other, but also institutionalizes or stabilizes certain discourses as normative. The productivity of the norm for Foucault is involved in the same process of knowledge and power by reference to its productivity in exposing the action of a norm, either as subject of knowledge or as subject of power, in accordance with a line that separates the licit from the illicit, and also in that which constitutes being itself, in the form of thinking subjects. Being a subject is being subjected, not merely in the sense of submitting to some external order that supposes a relation of pure domination, but to the insertion of individuals in networks that are homogeneous and continuous. This involves a normative disposition that reproduces them and transforms them into subjects. The disciplinary society involves practices that focus upon the norm, transcending a collection of social bodies and creating a common language across institutions. As with the effects of the discourse of normativity, the disciplinary society stabilizes specific relationships between social subjects in relation to specific objects. The diffusion of disciplines homogenizes social space. The norm is that whereby, and across which, society communicates with itself. What orthodox sociology has studied as patterned behavior, social norms, institutions, etc., as transcending individual behavior—Durkheim’s conscience collective—now becomes

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the effects of normativity. The norm is the link, the principle of unity and of communication of individualities. It is the reference point that institutes a social group assuming its objectivity in the form of the individual. Foucault’s perspective recognizes the norm as a principle of communication devoid of origin and devoid of subject. He denies the rational basis of the norm. Normative individualization happens without reference to nature or to an essence of subjects. There is not a specification that declares the qualities that the individual possesses within itself, which characterizes its genre or nature. Normative individualization is comparative in the sense that it individualizes without ceasing, at the same time, to instigate comparison around the common measure that is instituted in the pure reference of a group to itself. The normative involves how the local links with the global. Similarly, normative space does not acknowledge an outside, the abnormal not being merely another nature of the normal—the exception confirms the rule, but in so doing it is also part of the rule. The normative involves the modality of objects, the effect of the complex practices of normalization, and leads to confusing the normal with the moral. Consequently, if a philosophical discourse cannot enonce without affirming some norm then it also is implicated in the process of normativity. We can make the same claim of sociology and linguistics. Sociology becomes a particular order of discourse, a discourse that does have a subject in the sense that all discourses have a subject that carry the enonce, and which is inscribed in its structure. It is also a discourse that seeks to present the ‘real’ or the ‘true’. Foucault’s work draws upon Heideggar’s claim that ‘being’ takes its concrete form in practice, in the language and institutions of a given society, crossing all individuals who live in that society (Taylor 2005). These common practices that rule social life constitute the background plan that permits us to comprehend the value that is assigned to an object, to directing our actions against objects and particular individuals. Humankind appears within an ambiguous position, being both object for knowledge and the object that knows, becoming the sovereign that submits, the spectator that views, etc. It is a reiteration of how Kant constructed humankind as the source of the signification of objects and as an object operating within the world, thereby

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transforming philosophy into an anthropology as the science that interprets humankind while all the time knowing what humankind is. Heideggaar’s reference to the totalizing effect of what he called ‘total mobilization’ has its equivalent in how Foucault deals with normativity. The disciplines construct society as a form of common language between all sorts of institutions (Foucault 1994). Disciplinary society becomes a society of absolute communication. The normative permits the transformation of the general discipline into a disciplinary mechanism. The matrix that transforms the negative into the positive permits a disciplinary generalization, as that which is institutionalized through transformation. The normative is that whereby, and across which, society communicates with itself. It articulates the disciplines of production, knowledge, wealth, finance, making them interdisciplinary and homogenizing social space, even if it does not unify it. Normative individualization is achieved without reference to a nature, an essence of subjects. It does not have the form of a specification, it does not declare the qualities that the individual possesses, and which would be characteristic of its genre or its nature. It is a positive individualization devoid of a meta-physical being, an individualization without substance, somewhat like how an opposition of signifieds never return, other than as differences denying a substance of the signified. It is a pure relationship, but a relationship without a support. Normative individualization is purely comparative, and individualization is not achieved through categories, but at the interior of categories. It has no appeal to any knowledge external to that which it makes visible. Normative knowledge makes no appeal to an external to that upon which it works, to that which it makes visible. The norm is that measure which, while individualizing without ceasing, at the same time, renders it comparable. The individualization is never more than an expression of an indefinite relationship. The norm is a principle of comparison, of comparability, a common measure that is institutionalized in the pure reference of a group to itself, even though that group only has itself as support (Ewald 1989). The normative nature of sociology seen as discourse is not in doubt. Its focus upon patterns of human behavior that are conceived of as institutionalization, or that which is taken for granted, is an expression

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of the normative that is only recognized by reference to its difference from the deviant. It often reduces to the idea of a normativity internal to rationality itself. It is this which was the main thrust of Achard’s (1995) attempt to re-conceptualize FDA as a sociology of language. In that work he sought to relate modernist sociology’s notion of institutionalization with the idea of discursive marking. Institutions refer to the stable structure of types of acts, and the places with which they are associated. The individual cannot be drawn into these places other than by signification, and this interpolation of actor–speakers into the categorized places is a performative act. The sociological notion of institution, and the associated notion of institutionalization, are treated in terms of the relationship between the places that relate to the stable structuring of action, and how individuals are interpolated into these places. Furthermore, the places into which the individual is interpolated are not merely individual places but also pertain to social groups. Thus, a discourse on social differentiation may well open up places that pertain to gender, race, social class, etc. Since the subject lies at the intersection of form and meaning a stabilization of discursive forms is essential, the social boiling down to shared meanings constructed around similar subject positions. Sociology becomes a description of a system of places defined by their mutual relationship, allowing a description of social processes that are not reducible to the sum of individuals. In this respect there is the implication that norm and normativity imply a shared meaning, not merely between individuals, but, in some way, across individuals, being something which generates that which has become known as society. If the concern is therefore with the norm, it implies that it is the existence of this entity which creates or constitutes society. The system that sociology describes constitutes a materiality that Achard (1995) seeks to relate to discursive materiality. Since language production puts both social structure and the associated places, as well as the individual dimension of personality, in play, the effect of discursive materiality is found in the production of meaning that constitutes this structure. It implies the pre-existence of a social structure, and of the same conception of interaction as that of orthodox sociology, without the support of rationalism. This is qualified by the claim that it is

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in the discursive materiality that social places are defined, and not in an analytic meta-discourse of a sociology external to discourse. Achard also denies the involvement of a pre-constituted meta-physics since the social places are opened up by the materiality of discourse, and not in the analytic meta-discourse external to its object. The stabilization of the use of enonciative operators is not necessarily retaken in the form of a lexical designation so that social structure does not necessarily derive from the form of lexical terminology and classifiers. Social actors cannot conform to the vision of society contained by a sociology that constitutes a shorthand, an ideal type in Weber’s words. There is a sense in which a phenomenological input devoid of centrality emerges. Achard’s concern is with how the effects of meaning organize, and permit the understanding of, the dimension of physical inscription of the social processes. It involves two dimensions. First, the organization of the enonciation in relationship with social placing, which is a relationship resting on the deictic dimension and is motivated synchronically; and second, the effect of inter-discursive accumulation that constitutes the horizon of memory of notional functioning. Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogism, and Wittgenstein’s (1958) notion of language play as embedded in a form of life, invoked clarification of the nature of the social. Viewing all order as incomplete confirms the need to view the social and the normative, however conceived, as dynamic processes. The conception of texts as being located within the historical and the social, which are themselves texts into which the writer inserts herself by rewriting them, does not appear to take heterogeneity further than the more conventional conception. It does, however, link with the claim that the enonciateur anticipates understanding, and links to prior enonciation, thereby setting up a dialogical relationship with the locuteur, giving a firmer basis to the study of the thread of discourse, or the enonciative chain. This leads to a conception of language acts as linked to individual enonciation through a homogeneous signification that relates to language play. Language acts are structured by reference to domains that link to social practice. If this structure reveals the structure of the social, we are still unclear about the nature of the social except that it involves subject relationships that are conditioned by the interdiscursive.

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We are left with meaning being linked to social conflict over the interpretation of the sign so that signification is the line of conflict between social groups. This relates to the difference between the legitimate and the non-legitimate. Stabilization is treated as a feature of legitimation, there being no tension over meaning and the discourse is not marked for any group. However, the normative marks the non-normative, and therefore generates a tension over meaning that is a manifestation of contradictory places. Discourse supports social action, and therefore this contradiction sits upon places of enonciation that the taking in charge, or its refusal, legitimates or refutes. This, presumably, is how such contradiction establishes the nature of social groups within social practice, relating to identity, in that the social places are subjects as manifestations of identity.

Implications for Law Given the preceding it should be clear that the thrust of the analysis of discourse and society has taken a different direction than that invoked by Sumner’s attempt to refine Marxism and its relationship to ideology. In many respects it involves an engagement with the work of Foucault and the other post-structuralists. Nonetheless, it owes a great deal to the line of analysis undertaken by Sumner. Foucault’s notion of episteme refers to the conditions of possibility, an order underlying a given culture at a given time. It configures the prevailing discourses and the associated subjects and objects that structure society and its institutions, including the legal order. The neo-liberal discourse that drives globalization currently prevails by reference to the political rationality that relates to governance, constructing the individual as a self-governing subject with moral responsibilities and obligations (Williams and Williams 2016). It provides meta-messages about the basis for practices within institutional contexts as a form of discipline based on the normative, or a code of normalization, rather than a discipline that derives from the juridical. Neo-liberalism is mediated through law and involves a change in the conception of law, not in the direction of a normative mechanism

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within a disciplinary society where legal networks dissolve, nor a society that distinguishes between those normativized and those that are judged to be incapable of normativization, but by not confusing the form of law with its function so that the rules of the game are retained. The citizen becomes a rational subject maximizing their utility function within a flexibility and elasticity that permits calculation by reference to action on the environment. The terms of the game rather than the mentality of the subject requires modification through social policy. Our understanding of law is modified in reproducing and re-articulating cultural values. This social policy relies not merely on a parliamentary will in the form of statutes and regulations, but also on how the normative is conditioned by the values enshrined in common law. This serves to sustain the legal institutions and their discourses. Thus, the rule of law regulates the procedures whereby the law is applied, while the substantive values applied by the courts in adjudicating between conflicting principles have at their heart the goal of maintaining some elements of the status quo. Yet it is also dynamic, leading to a compromise between the normativity generated by the effects of the neo-liberal discourse and the ‘tradition’ of the prevailing legal order. The notion of the ‘reasonable man’ encompasses a sense of stability by reference to ‘reason’ and the ‘universal’. Since the neo-liberal discourse emphasizes the retreat of the state, the role of the rule of law is enhanced. Clearly, the discourses mediated by law are partly regulated by historical institutional values. Yet this ‘historical’ is constantly modified, as is acknowledged by those critical legal theorists who recognize the influence of discourse on social and legal policy (MacKinnon 1987; Crenshaw et al. 1995). In common with other institutions, law becomes the site of contestation. Thus, the sense of shared sovereignty associated with political decentralization on the one hand, and political integration on the other, modifies the construction of shared sovereignty within the legal discourse. It involves a tension between the particular and the universal within the chain of equivalence that expresses a sense of sameness across the various particulars. In international law the universal is accommodated by recourse to ‘human rights’, constructed as that which makes democratic society possible. It derives, not from the

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black letter of the law but, rather, from how the effects of the neo-liberal discourse promotes a geo-political context that involves a new sense of stability and predictability that rests on the status quo. It serves as a hegemonizing force constructed around the values of a specific form of democracy that achieves a sense of universalism. Sovereignty rests less on juridical rule of the nation-state than on the collaborative effort of a diverse citizenry given the responsibility for both the integration of society and their own integration with that society.

Note 1. An awareness that many of the French language terms do not correspond to what are taken to be their English language equivalents leads us to use the French language terms of the original source. Enonce and statement is a case in point.

References Achard, P. (1995). Formation discursive, dialogisme et sociologie. Langages, 117, 82–86. Althusser, L. (1965). Pour Marx. Paris: Maspero. Althusser, L. (1968). Lire Le Capital. Paris: Maspero. Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays. London: New Left Books. Bachelard, G. (1972). L’engagement rationaliste. Paris: PUF. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogical imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benveniste, E. (1966). Problemes de la Linguistique Générale. Paris: Gallimard. Canguilhem, G. (1966). Le Normal et la Pathologique. Paris: PUF. Courtine, J. (1981). Analyse du discours politique: Quelques problèmes théoriques et méthodologiques en analyse du discours, à propos du discours communiste adressé aux chrétiens. Langages, 62, 127. Crenshaw, K., et al. (1995). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement. New York: New York Press.

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Culioli, A. (1990). Pour une linguistique de l’ énnonciation: Opérations et représentation (Vol. 1). Paris: Ophrys. Culioli, A., Fuchs, C., & Pecheusx, M. (1970). Considérations théoriques à propos du traitement formel du langage. Documents de Linguistique Quantitative, 7, 1–4. Dreyfus, H. L., & Wrathall, M. A. (2005). A companion to Heidegger. Oxford: Blackwell. Ewald, F. (1989). Un pouvoir sans dehors. In na, Michel Foucault philosophe: Recontre Internationale (pp. 196–203). Foucault, M. (1969). L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1994). The punitive society. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, ethics (Vol. 1, pp. 22–37). London: Penguin. Husserl, E. (1970). Logical investigations. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lacan, J. (1966). Ecrits I. Paris: Seuil. MacKinnon, C. A. (1987). Feminism unmodified: Discourses on life and law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nadler, S. (2001). Spinoza: A life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1969). The genarology of morals. New York: Random House. Pecheux, M. (1975). La Vérité de la Palice. Paris: Maspero. Pecheux, M. (1982). Language, semantics and ideology. London: Macmillan. de Saussure, F. (1972). Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot. Sumner, C. (1979). Reading ideologies. London: Academic Press. Taylor, C. (2005). Heidgger on language. In H. L. Dreyfus & M. A. Wrathall (Eds.), A companion to Heidegger (pp. 433–455). Oxford: Blackwell. Williams, G. (1999). French discourse analysis: The method of post-structuralism. London: Routledge. Williams, G., & Williams, G. O. (2016). Language, hegemony and the European Union. London: Palgrave. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Balckwell.

Authors’ Biography Glyn Williams  took his first degree at the University of Wales before taking a post graduate degree at University of California, Berkeley followed by a doctorate at the University of Wales. Taught at the University of San Francisco prior to returning to teach at the University of Wales. During the early 1970s, he was a Ford Foundation Foreign Fellow, working in Argentina. Subsequently,

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he taught at what is now Bangor University, UC Dublin, Cardiff University and University Ramon Llull in Barcelona. He has authored or co-authored 14 books and more than 100 academic papers. Gruffud Williams  was educated at University College London and Oxford University and is a lawyer in private practice at an international law firm. He was previously employed by the European Commission in Brussels.