The Taming of New York's Washington Square by Erich Goode

Author:Erich Goode [Goode, Erich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9781479878574
Google: zH5yDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2018-12-04T04:25:42+00:00

A Dialogue with a Sociologist of Deviance on Social Control

It’s the summer of 2016 and I’m sitting with Nachman Ben-Yehuda, a friend and a sociologist of deviance (1985, 1990, 2013) on a bench in Washington Square that’s adjacent to a pathway just west of the fountain. Dozens of people stream by in singletons and multiples. I ask him to appreciate the diversity of humanity passing by this spot—possibly more diversity than obtains in any other place on earth. One by one, I take note of the variety of the human species parading before us. “You talk of diversity here,” he responds, “but consider this: In this park, most people are very well-behaved. Hardly anyone commits serious deviance in Washington Square. No revolution is being plotted here, no murders are committed, no robberies or rapes—no serious crime of any kind. This place is not a breeding ground of deviance. Everybody gives room to others to do their thing. Nothing earth-shaking is happening in this place.”

“I’m not sure if I follow you, Nachman. There’s very little crime here, but that’s the point. People are civil to one another as long as their behavior doesn’t infringe on the rights of others. They exercise informal social control on one another for the preservation of a common good. Unless you want to say that crime is the only form of serious deviance and any other type of deviance is trivial.”

“Well, one of the issues you have to address is change over time. There were bigger rifts and challenges in the past than is true now. Race and civil rights used to be a more important source of conflict in the fifties and sixties. Now, no race riots, no civil rights movement, no civil rights demonstrations in the park, and a black man was elected and reelected president of the United States. Race isn’t as much of an issue as it was in the past. And there’s no major conflict that’s comparable to Vietnam, just smaller ones, so there are no antiwar protests in Washington Square. Women have rights they didn’t have and have won lots of political victories. Change over time means that there are no serious schisms tearing the country apart, so diversity has been tamped down or swallowed up, both here in the park and throughout the society. And you also have to look at differences among parks. You see more crazies in Washington Square than in Tompkins Square Park and Union Square. Craziness and other extreme eccentricities are more accepted here and not there, and that’s why the mentally ill come here—they know they’ll be tolerated.”

“But that’s what I’m talking about. You’re making my point exactly. But if they go beyond a certain point, we, or the authorities, will come down on them.”

“Craziness doesn’t challenge the system. What we see here is the successful exercise of social control,” my friend responds. “People here are being controlled.”

“By whom?” I ask. “And to whose end? And how? In what way? What’s the nature of this control? There’s a lot of angry people in this country.

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