The Politics of Antisocial Behaviour by Stuart Waiton

Author:Stuart Waiton [Waiton, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, Sociology, General, Violence in Society
ISBN: 9781135909314
Google: s66TAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-11-24T04:40:58+00:00

DIMINISHED SOCIAL DIMINISHED INDIVIDUAL

In the UK, like the USA, a therapeutic relationship with the public has developed at the same time as a more punitive approach to criminal justice emerged. Both of these developments can be understood as a more alienated engagement between the individual and the state—an engagement predicated upon a diminished sense of the social and also of the ‘moral individual’.

Right realism—an outlook that developed in the USA in the 1970s and influencedthe rise of ‘administrative criminology’ in the UK—was based on a critique of sociological positivism and radical criminology, fundamentally arguing that there was no point in attempting to work out the cause of crime when all that was needed was a set of measures to control it. What resulted in a number of technical or practical approaches to crime reduction was however, in the broader sense, an expression, like the left realists, of pessimism about social change and development—a limiting of expectations of both understanding crime—but more importantly of engaging with and changing the public and society more generally. The exasperation of American conservatives in the seventies—was expressed both in the growth of penal policies at the time, and in popular culture

In films like Dirty Harry, Death Wish and Taxi Driver a sense of frustration about crime is mixed with a demand—or more accurately a scream—that ‘something must be done’. The vigilantism of Harry Callahan, Paul Kersey and Travis Bickel expresses well both the sense of urban decay and violence that was understood by some to have taken over American cities and also the exasperation and disconnection felt towards the establishment and indeed the public. Ultimately, across this genre of seventies films there is little sense of hope but rather of hopelessness, of inevitable defeat and decay: The scum on the streets were winning—and were being helped by the liberal institutions in American society.

The promotion of vigilantism and the right realist reaction against ‘liberal excuses’ for the causes of crime was based upon an estrangement from the ‘social’ and from society’s institutions—from politics and ultimately from the ‘public’ itself.

Right realists while connecting with victims of crime and more generally with a sense of alienation amongst an increasingly anxious public, addressed crime not through politics and social ideals but through a rejection of this wider engagement with society. We need, argued James Q. Wilson ‘a more sober view of man’, foolish aspirations needed to be abandoned ‘and utopian things forgotten’. Individual victims, rather than social changes, Wilson argued, should be the focus for public policy and policing alike. We may only reduce robbery by 20 percent—he stated, something that ‘would still leave us with the highest robbery rate of almost any Western nation’, but this, ‘small gain for society [was] a large one for the would be victim’ (Wilson 1985:250).

Only a decade earlier the optimism of the sixties and of the Western World had been encapsulated in Neil Armstrong’s statement that landing on the Moon was ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’. For

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