Youth & Crime by John Muncie

Author:John Muncie
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473911291
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Published: 2015-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

In the 1970s, the answer to such ambiguities lay in situating particular processes of social control in their precise socio-structural and historical settings. The emerging Marxist criminology and sociology of law, for example, placed a theory of the state centre-stage in the analysis of how control was exercised (see Chapter 4.1). Hall et al. (1978, p. 195), for example, found the control culture approach to be ahistorical and too imprecise for an adequate understanding of processes of conformity, legitimation and, most significantly, opposition, in the class-structured democracies of ‘late capitalism’. It did not locate centres of power historically and thus was unable to account for moments of shift and change; it failed to differentiate between different types of state and political regime; and did not specify the type of social formation which requires a particular form of legal order. Above all, it adopted a predominantly coercive view of power and legal relations. Simply substituting coercion for the functionalist notion of consensus failed to identify how the exercise of power was often legitimized. The complex combination of processes of social regulation and civil liberties, of naked force and willing consent, and of resistance and deference was, quite simply, lost in a perspective that caricatured all police, social workers, teachers, philanthropists and reformers as unconscious agents of socio-cultural repression (Hall and Scraton, 1981, p. 470). As a result, Hall et al. (1978, p. 195) argued for the abandonment of the term ‘social control’ (except for ‘general descriptive purposes’) and its subjugation to that of state control. This, they argued, would enable recognition that the production of consent is achieved not simply through coercive measures, but through state leadership, direction, education and tutelage. Chunn and Gavigan reached a similar conclusion, again by stressing the ahistorical nature of ‘social control’ and by arguing that critical scholars should be searching for alternative concepts that are ‘attentive to the dynamic complexity of history, struggle and change’ (1988, p. 120).

Feminist research has also alerted us to significant gender-based differences in the operation of both social and state control (Heidensohn, 1985). Disobedient or runaway young women and the ‘unfit’ teenage mother are far more likely to be candidates for intervention than disobedient, runaway or sexually active heterosexual young men. Moreover many social and employment policies have traditionally tended to be predicated on assumptions of female dependency and male independence. Systems of social control impact differently on different subject populations. A state-centred perspective may be able to recognize how ‘social control’ produces (rather than simply prohibits) certain behaviours, but on its own is unable to capture the nuances of control afforded by a ‘gendered lens’ (Walklate, 1995). In addition, some feminist authors have argued that the extension of control in some areas, rather than being dangerous, is urgently required in order to protect women from male domestic and street violence. As Smart (1989) argues, the law can be used not simply for disciplinary purposes, but also as a means to pursue a discourse of ‘rights’.

Foucault on the Carceral Society

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