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Abstract
This article examines the relation between criminology and the state in the
postwar period. The article begins by looking at the role of the criminologist
in the emerging welfare state. Here the state was regarded as benevolent,
while the task of the criminologist was to help guide penal policy along
benevolent lines. We then chart the development of a more critical
approach to the state, now conceived as an authoritarian formation by
critical theorists who no longer considered themselves insiders. We then
trace a range of forces that worked to marginalise the state now
increasingly viewed as irrelevant. These include the triumph of
neoliberalism, the reception of Foucault’s work and globalisation theory on
mainstream criminological thinking. We conclude by drawing attention to
the reality of a post-welfare, neoliberal order, in which the state never went
away, and profile recent attempts to theorise its nature. In the context of
societies where state power is omnipresent in our lives, we suggest the
time has now arrived when we need to reconnect the body of the King with
his decapitated head.
Keywords
globalization, governmentality, neoliberalism, social control, state
In this article we problematise this shift: the rise of and retreat from the
state. To accomplish this, we present a story in four stages. We begin in
the context of the post Second World War, welfare state settlement, an era
when the state was considered a benign actor and one which
criminologists could unproblematically work with and for. We then trace the
rise of a new critically informed approach to the welfare state as it began to
enter a period of crisis from the 1970s onward. Here the state began to be
perceived less as a benevolent actor and more as an authoritarian
formation. With particular reference to the work of Hall and his colleagues
we examine the development of this, the authoritarian state thesis, and
consider its various offspring. We then consider a range of forces that have
collectively worked to marginalise the analysis of the state within
criminology. These include the triumph of neoliberalism, the decline of
Marxism, the reception of Foucault’s work and the impact of globalisation
theory on criminological thought. Finally, we profile an emerging body of
critical work that not only attests to the continued significance of the state
but also casts considerable doubt on many of the criticisms that have been
made justifying its marginalisation. In the context of a criminological
tradition that still remains in hock to Foucault’s injunction that analysis
would proceed better by metaphorically cutting off the King’s head, we will
suggest that these developments invite us to rethink this approach. In the
context of societies where the state never disappeared and where state
power is omnipresent in our lives, we suggest the time has now arrived
when we need to reconnect the body of the King with his decapitated head.
Within the developing welfare state this elite, by and large, conceived crime
as a social problem that had social causes that benevolent interventions
could engineer away. Working broadly within a positivistic tradition, crime
was conceived as a residual problem that an expanding welfare state,
committed to full employment and organised around Keynesian principles,
could address. Crime was low on the political agenda and its regulation
was seen as a largely apolitical technical issue (Downes and Morgan,
1994). While prisons existed, they were by and large viewed as relics of a
bygone era soon to be rendered obsolete by new cadres of experts
committed to the benevolent progress model of social change (Cohen,
1985).
Within the order of ‘penal welfarism’, as Garland would term this complex
(Garland, 2001), the state was not itself an object of enquiry. Criminology
was a discourse of the state and the criminologist someone who
unproblematically worked to ensure that the social response to crime
proceeded benevolently. Such optimism, however, would be short-lived as
the welfare settlement began to fracture and crime rates began their
seemingly inexorable rise upwards. While the crime experts employed
within bodies such as the Home Office remained, over time they would
begin to play a far less prominent part in the business of crime control.
Partly, they were crippled by what Jock Young identified as an ‘aetiological
crisis’ gathering pace from the 1960s in which mainstream criminology
found itself unable to reconcile rising crime rates with continued economic
expansion and overall reductions of poverty (Young, 1987). Meanwhile new
players began to enter the field. Of particular relevance were new cadres of
law-and-order politicians who had little faith in the expertise of restricted
elites and who, in societies where crime control was becoming ever more
politicised, began to initiate a punitive turn in penal policy in which, from
being considered the solution to the problems posed by crime, penal
welfarism itself came to be viewed as part of the problem (Garland, 2001).
Against a backdrop characterised by a wider crisis of the welfare state,
intensifying class conflict and a new more authoritarian law-and-order
climate, the emerging state form itself would become the subject of
analysis by a new, critically informed and sociologically grounded group of
social scientists, not least among which were the new class of
criminologists who attended the new National Deviancy conferences of the
1970s. These sociologists by no means saw themselves as servants of the
state, nor did they view the state as a benevolent actor.
It is in the work of Stuart Hall and his colleagues in the Birmingham School
that we witness the first comprehensive attempt to problematise the state,
a theme they substantively developed in their seminal work, Policing the
Crisis (Hall et al., 1978). Though formally an analysis of the social
response to a street crime wave, the book may be more accurately
understood as an attempt to grasp the cultural dynamics of the British state
as it began to mutate in a more authoritarian direction as the welfare state
settlement of the postwar years began to fracture in the 1970s. As this text
was pivotal to the development of critical criminology, a brief consideration
of its central argument is justified.
By the end of the 1970s the British state was confronting what Hall et al.,
drawing upon Gramsci, defined as an ‘organic crisis’ (Gramsci, 1971). In
effect, it could no longer reproduce the conditions necessary to sustain the
circuit of capital and thus capitalist accumulation. The postwar boom
economy had tilted towards recession and industrial decline, one
consequence of which would be Britain’s diminished status as a world
power. In the face of burgeoning economic crisis that would herald mass
industrial unrest, three-day weeks and eventually the destruction of vast
sectors of its primary manufacturing industry, the hegemonic consensus
that had been established in the welfare state began to fracture. The
recognition of workers’ organisations, extension of workers’ rights,
corporatist trends, the formation of an inclusive welfare state—the very
terms by which the postwar hegemony had been achieved—began to fall
apart. A state crisis was provoked in a context where capitalism’s failure as
an economic system was in danger of being openly revealed.
It was during this period of crisis where the existing hegemonic project was
failing that the beginning of a new one began to be forged. The medium of
transformation and the subject matter of Policing the Crisis was itself the
social response to what was presented through the media at the time as an
unprecedented crisis of law and order posed by a new category of deviant,
the black street ‘mugger’. Drawing upon Stan Cohen’s work but resituating
his analysis within a Marxist political economy, Hall et al. argued that the
sensational media reporting of black street theft derived, not from any
noticeable rise in street crime, but rather from a moral panic. The timing of
the moral panic was, Hall et al. affirmed, by no means accidental: this was
a panic with a purpose. What it would facilitate was a way of resolving the
organic crisis of the state by helping forge a new hegemonic equilibrium.
It would function this way because in the media identification of the ‘black
mugger’ a convenient scapegoat was devised upon which the collective
fury of British society could be harnessed and projected. Different classes
may well be opposed but street crime provided a point of negative
identification around which a class consensus could be constructed and
through it a disunited society would become unified in their fear and hatred.
Moreover, this unified public would also come to accept the state-driven
authoritarian ‘solution’ to the crisis as morally just and justified. This would
resolve itself into the derogation of ever more coercive powers to the
repressive apparatus of the state.
Through this scapegoating process a crisis that had its genesis in the
economic base was successfully displaced to the ideological
superstructure where it became reconstructed as a crisis over law and
order. In this act of ideological displacement the conditions were created
for what would become a new hegemonic equilibrium, and so a new
authoritarian state was born in what Stuart Hall would go on to define as
the forward ‘drift into a law and order society’.
After Hall and his colleagues’ intervention, critical criminology by and large
came to accept the vision of the authoritarian state as this had been
articulated in Policing the Crisis. In Phil Scraton’s edited collection
(Scraton, 1988), the British state is predominantly presented as a coercive
formation which mobilises the mechanisms of the criminal justice system
for the purpose of class, gender and ethnic repression against
what Hillyard (1993) would subsequently come to term various ‘suspect
communities’. From an analysis of state transformation the focus of critical
criminology began to shift towards charting the way the criminalisation
process was being enacted against various deviant groups by the state
apparatus and registering the harms it occasioned along the way. The state
in the process came to be seen as little more than a perennial authoritarian
formation that was inherently violent. Critical criminology registered the
effects of this violence and sought to celebrate all forms of resistance
against it.
The endgame of this line of analysis would resolve itself into several
tendencies, both supportive and critical. The analysis of resistance would
become the focus of various ‘underdog’ forms of sociology. Youth
subculture, in particular, became the favoured object of analysis. Its stylistic
innovations were celebrated and subsequently explained as indicative of a
culture of resistance. This form of analysis would result in one of the other
great achievements of the Birmingham School, Resistance through
Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 1976), the themes of which are still reproduced
today in cultural criminology (Ferrell, 2004; Ferrell and Sanders, 1995). The
authoritarian state thesis also provoked renewed interest in the study of
state crime, where the state was now treated as no more than a criminal
actor in its own right. The work of Tony Ward and Penny Green today
exemplify this tradition (Green and Ward, 2004). Finally, having challenged
the legitimacy of criminal law and beyond that the repressive apparatus of
the state, critical criminologists have sought to discover alternative
approaches by and through which social harms could be addressed and
resolved without recourse to state repression. Abolitionism, in this sense,
emerged as a replacement discourse to criminal justice for critical
criminology (de Haan, 1990; Hulsman, 1986).
But at the same time within critical criminology the study of the state began
to wither. The theoretical landscape was also changing, and in ways that
would further marginalise the state and its analysis. Of these, four bear
consideration.
First, there was a general disenchantment with Marxism and its key
assumptions, part of what Ellen Meiksins Wood (1986) termed ‘a retreat
from class’. Various proponents of ‘post Marxism’ attacked its status as a
master narrative. The ascendancy of identity politics along with forms of
poststructural theory also helped intensify a retreat from the study of social
class. In the UK this process of disenchantment was reflected in
developments ranging from the collapse of the magazine Marxism
Today to the defeat of the trade unions by the Thatcher governments. On a
larger scale the tendency was reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the triumph of free market capitalism under American
hegemony. While a Marxist-inspired critical criminology continued, it
remained at the margins of the discipline.
The retreat from class was part of a general retreat from capitalism as the
key driver of social development. Emphasis shifted from late
capitalism (Mandel, 1975) to late modernity (see Garland, 2001; Young,
1999, 2007) which, while providing perceptive analysis of the anomie,
fragmentation and uncertainty of contemporary society, tended to
underemphasise the rootedness of these developments in the concrete
dynamics of capitalist development. The result was a lack of focus on
neoliberalism as a distinct articulation of state strategy. In his materialist
contribution to the rehabilitation of the state as an instrument for the control
and oppression of the poor, Loïc Wacquant (2009: 303) emphasises that:
it is not the generic ‘risks and anxieties’ of ‘the open, porous, mobile society
of strangers that is late modernity’ that have fostered retaliation against
lower-class categories … but the specific social insecurity generated by the
fragmentation of wage labour.
The second major transition that would help stimulate the movement away
from the state was the reception of Foucault’s work and the huge influence
the ‘Foucault effect’ had on theory and practice. Though by no means
hostile to a Marxist tradition in which he was also a major force, Foucault’s
work challenged many Marxist assumptions about the centrality of the
state. It was a challenge played out on many fronts. His analysis of the
disciplines, understood as grounded upon generative power, was
developed as a direct challenge to a Marxist tradition which he saw as
overemphasising state power as a negative expression of force and
coercion (Foucault, 1979). In place of a focus on the state understood as a
juridical regime, Foucault stressed the importance of governmentality and
governance. This, understood as ‘the conduct of conduct’, was a process
occurring on a plurality of levels, micro and macro, and by a variety of
agencies besides the state, including families, communities, a wide variety
of non-state actors and private entities (Johnston and Shearing,
2003; Singh, 2005). The state was relegated to the status of simply one of
a number of actors in this process whose role could be easily
overemphasised. This theoretical sidelining was subsequently embraced
by Foucault’s followers, who had little trouble in further marginalising the
state in their own analysis where its death was described variously as the
‘rolling back’ of the state, the retreat of its functions from ‘rowing’ to
‘steering’ (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992) and the ‘death of the social’ (Rose,
1996).
The third tendency that would conspire to marginalise the state was the
growing body of literature on globalisation where this was theorised as a
force that was fatally weakening the coordination powers of nation-states,
not only over their economies but also over such matters as cultural values
and population movements. With new global flows in capital, technology,
culture, information and people, the image of the nation-state as a self-
contained socioeconomic and political structure appeared to belong to a
stage in modernity that was fast disappearing. Franko Aas summarises
well the underlying thinking:
The various global flows, modalities, and ‘scapes’ challenge the idea that
we are dealing with homogenous, territorially delineated units of research
indeed if we ever have been. They challenge ‘the assumptions about the
nation state as a container of progress (Sasson 2007). (Franko Aas, 2010:
431)1
As a thesis about the ‘withering away of the state’, globalisation can muster
some powerful arguments, specifically in relation to the state’s incapacity to
regulate these new global flows. Such stark limits can be seen in the
state’s inability to regulate the huge wealth hidden in offshore tax havens
(Sheptycki, 2000); in the inability of western states to curb the supply and
consumption of illegal drugs—despite their formal commitment to build
‘drug-free societies’; and their inability to successfully draw to a conclusion
foreign policy adventures in states such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
The problem is that the state never went away. Nor did it stand still. Indeed,
many of the developments which were seen as heralding its demise were
only possible through the decisive exercise of state power. What appeared
as decline and debilitation was in fact part of the process of mutation and
rearticulation (Crawford, 2006; Hallsworth and Lea, 2011; Lea 2002).
Furthermore, it is no exaggeration to assert that the global economic crisis
unfolding since 2007 has decisively settled the issue of the continued
centrality of the state as an instrument of both economic and social policy
and a decisive actor in the international system. What concerns us here is
how this has been reflected in the way various tendencies in criminology
have sought to refocus on the state. In what follows we conclude by looking
at three adaptive responses to the state as these have been undertaken
respectively by liberal criminologists, administrative criminologists and
critical criminologists.
Such a view can be admired for its integrity; however, as Loïc Wacquant
has wryly commented, Loader and Sparks’s text is:
The centrality of the state has been reconfirmed and the task of critical
criminology in relation to the state is now clearer than it has been for some
time: to document and understand the new forms of regulation and
coercion that are emerging in the fields of penality, security and crime
control. This project, we conclude, is integral to any attempt to (re)develop
‘new deviancy’ for new, new times.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the
public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1.It should be noted that here that Franko Aas is summarising the debate.
As she subsequently makes clear, far from globalisation withering the
state, such developments have created the preconditions for a significant
coercive reasserton of state power and authority, a view commensurate
with our own.
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