Cultural criminology: critical criminology in late modernity

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Cultural criminology: critical criminology in late

modernity by Deborah Talbot (2009).

What follows…is a provocation, not a prescription – an absurdity structured

around loose themes that don’t have to add up to a monolithic unity but open up

a series of enticing vistas. They should be seen as pieces of the same puzzle,

each explaining and intertwining with the other to unleash the potential of a

cultural criminology (Ferrell et al. 2004a, p.1).

Taken from the introduction to a collected edition of the works from academics working

in what can loosely be described as the field of cultural criminology, this quote is

intended to express a new direction within criminology as a subject area. It referred to the

essays contained within as a ‘provocation’, meaning that cultural criminology aimed to

open up a debate around the direction of criminology. The specific focus of attack was

‘administrative criminology’ – the idea that criminological thinking should be directed by

the needs of policy and that the role of the researcher was to statistically accumulate facts

about crime and find policy solutions to control it. The context of cultural criminology is

institutional, bound up in academic debates about the future of criminology and

attempting to recover – with varying success – the lost ground of labelling and critical

criminological approaches.

Cultural criminology argues that the attempt to statistically analyse crime data in the

context of the massive and fluid social changes we have experienced in the West in the

past two decades, whether through official statistics or crime surveys, is doomed to

failure (Young 2004). Statistics do not allow the researcher to understand the nature of

those social changes and their impact on the subjectivity of people living within and

through them. Rather, it follows the lead of Ned Polsky, who argued in 1967 that

criminology had been the ‘least successful’ of all the sub-fields of sociology in ‘freeing

itself from traditional social-work concerns’ and that ‘if we are to make a major advance

in our scientific understanding of criminal lifestyles, criminal subcultures, and their

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relation to the larger society, we must undertake genuine field research on these people’

(1967, p.115). Cultural criminology argues that we should study the life world, the

biography, and the meanings generated by the criminal, the deviant, or the parameters of

‘late modern’ culture. As already stated, this draws on previous theoretical development.

Labelling and critical criminological perspectives and the ethnographic approach are the

main ancestors of the ‘cultural turn’ exemplified by cultural criminology, because they

embody the analysis of social structure and subjectivity/human agency (Ferrell et al.

2008) that it seeks to capture.

As the quote also suggests, in rejecting the idea of theory as a ‘monolithic unity’ in

favour of a ‘series of enticing vistas’, cultural criminology expressed more than any other

criminological theory we have examined so far, the move away from ‘grand narratives’

and ‘big theory’. It can rather been seen as a broad research agenda, which is attempting

to recover a sociology of meaning and subjectivity, and which may take different forms.

It is also a work in progress, and, at the time of writing, still struggling to find common

ground between its disparate parts beyond a mood of challenge and a rejection of the

administrative criminology of the 1980s and 1990s.

In an era where an obsession with the statistical predication of behaviour, overt policy

agendas and punitive orientations in this criminal justice system locally and

internationally have reached a high point, exemplified by the ‘crime prevention and

policy’ approach, it seems odd that a small collection of academics largely based in the

US and the UK should attempt to recover and reinterpret radical agendas from the post-

war era and particularly the 1960s and 1970s. It is an example, however, of how

alternative political narratives are competing for dominance in contemporary society. The

sense of social upheaval caused by recent events, such as the ‘war on terror’, civil war

and social instability have been shaped on the one hand by a traditional law and order

response which aims to isolate, contain and destroy the ‘enemy’ as a symbol of ‘evil’ –

relying on global gulags, concrete walls such as that being erected between Palestine and

Israel, making Gaza effectively prison cum ghetto, the mobilisation of private and public

armies (Wood and Shearing 2007), anti-terror laws and torture, to name but a few. On the

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other, theorists and policy-makers globally and more generally have taken issue with this

counter-productive approach and have instead proposed that we attempt to understand the

preconditions for violence and instability as embedded within global inequality and

disempowerment (Sen 2000). Some cultural criminologists, as part of this counter

discourse, have undertaken research on, for example, terrorism and torture (see Hamm,

one of the case studies examined later) and as such have taken deviancy theory to new

terrain, that is, the study of serious violence as opposed to minor cultural deviance.

While in the US, cultural criminology may be said to be more embedded within the

‘culture wars’ between the neo-conservative right and the culturally liberal left, in the UK

it is possible to see these new intellectual trends as a reaction to over a decade of New

Labour policy in the UK and particularly how this has impacted upon thinking about

crime within academia and in policy networks. Criminological thinking has tended to

overemphasise the idea of crime as opportunistic, where a rationally calculating criminal

judges whether the conditions are right to commit a crime. Hence much policy work is

devoted to manipulating the environment and architecture that frames the ‘crime event’

and academics are called upon to then evaluate the success of that manipulation.

However, this approach does not account for what we might call the ‘human factor’. As

Jock Young argues:

I have no doubt that much crime is mundane, instrumental and opportunistic in

motivation and that there are people whose response to crime is cool, calculated

and rationalistic. But an awful lot of crime, from joyriding to murder, from

telephone kiosk vandalism to rape, involves more than instrumental

motivation…cultural criminology reveals exactly the opposite of Felson’s world

of mundane crime stressing the sensual nature of crime, the adrenaline rushes of

edgework – voluntary illicit risk-taking and the dialectic of fear and pleasure

(2007, p.19).

For cultural criminology therefore, crime, deviance and general risk-taking is not

necessarily susceptible to crime control or crime prevention measures. Because such

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activities can in themselves be simply exciting, a thrill, a challenge, law and order

measures run the risk of simply adding to the frisson of crime. Witness, for example, that,

for some in the UK, being subject to an Anti-Social Behaviour Order has become a

‘badge of honour’, rather than something shameful. This chapter will return to these

motivational explanations of crime later. It naturally follows however that an intellectual

approach that either challenges the crime control model, or evades it entirely in the joys

of constructing a socio-fictional account of everyday life and transgression, would sit

uneasily on a world where academic advancement is based upon the volume of

publications and research grants (Walters 2003).

In the following sections, this chapter will outline some of the key ideas that embody

cultural criminology. It shall begin by exploring the work of Jack Katz, who sought to

outline the emotional content of crime free from a discussion of social structure that had

dominated ‘left leaning’ thinking about crime. It will then move on to look at the

emergence of cultural criminology as a defined criminological perspective by reabsorbing

an understanding of social structure. It will outline its embeddedness in the concept of

‘late modernity’ – specifically the dominance of representational forms such as cultural

artefacts and the media in shaping and defining cultural behaviours and the relationship

of culture to deviancy and transgression. The chapter will then explore the social (or

policy) relevance of cultural criminology, emergent criticisms of this approach, which

borrow heavily from past debates we have already explored in this book. Finally, this

chapter will look at a case study that exemplifies the cultural criminological approach –

the study of extreme violence and terrorism.

Seductions of crime – Katz on emotion, ritual and magic

In many respects the first distinctively ‘cultural criminological’ text was written by Jack

Katz in 1988, and was entitled Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of

Doing Evil. The book emerged from a number of different directions; the preface, for

example, acknowledged the assistance of Howard Becker, and its interest in social

interactions was apparent. He advocated a form of ‘phenomenological ethnography’

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(Katz and Csordas 2003) in research, which meant that social life needed to be grasped

intuitively and in its immediacy, rather than through its cultural representation or

construct; thus ‘culture as lived is never quite the same as the culture as represented’

(Ibid., p.285). Katz was interested in the ‘crime event’ although in a very distinctly

different way from rational choice theories; his emphasis was on the emotional content of

the crime event and one of the critical questions he asked was ‘what are people trying to

do when they commit a crime?’ (Katz 1988, p.8).

Katz believed it was important to focus on the dynamic of the crime event and how

people respond emotionally within those situations; this, he felt, could go a long way in

explaining what happens in those events. Katz argued that through rituals working

themselves through the body and over or against another, emotional responses became

heightened, a person suspends his or her own will and they lose themselves in emotional

content of the moment, a process Katz refers to as ‘transcendence’:

By pacifying his subjectivity, a person can conjure up a magic so powerful that it can

change his ontology (Katz 1988, p.8).

He starts for example with torture, where the repeated blows or acts by the torturer take

on a life of their own, changing the perceptions of the torturer and creating a sense of

thrill and excitement and changing the sense of self. The events that occurred at Abu

Ghraib in Iraq, for example, confirm this in one sense. In the photographs of the abuse,

the soldiers seemed to have no sense of their own reality of culpability - they were lost in

the moment. Another example he examines in his book is homicide – the killing on one

person by another. Katz argues that what is occurring within the moment of the act of

homicide is that the perpetrator believes that in killing another person he or she

understands that they are acting in defence of the ‘good’ or the ‘eternal good’, by which

he means long-standing social values:

One feature of homicide…is its character as a self-righteous act undertaken within

the form of defending communal values (ibid., p18).

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He unpacks the dynamic and features of many case studies of homicide in his book. One

of these is from a Canadian study, and the account is the husband’s after the killing had

occurred:

About two weeks prior to the homicidal act…the wife openly told John that he was

not wanted anymore and she wanted him to leave home. John begged her to do

something and save the marriage for the sake of the children but the wife refused to

discuss it further. John was so upset that he bought a rifle, intending to commit

suicide. Just three days prior to the homicide John’s wife returned home to take the

children…When this happened John was crushed emotionally and was looking for

ways to hurt himself…After three days (and on Mother’s Day) the wife returned

home to take the children and go away again. John begged her not to do such a thing

to the children but she ignored him. During this argument the children became upset

and started crying. The John turned to the wife and told her what she was doing to

the children [sic]. When the wife replied that she “didn’t give a damn about the

children,” John grabbed a knife and stabbed her to death (Katz 1988, p.15).

The core emotional issue for homicide is that the perpetrator feels humiliation, which he

or she is able to convert into rage, accompanied by a sense of righteousness, which the

killing resolves, even there may not be an intention to kill. The victim ‘teases, dares,

defies, or pursues’ the perpetrator and destroys his or sense or moral worth, soul or

identity thereby throwing the perpetrator into a state of humiliation, which Katz likens to

a feeling of sinking, of being submerged. There appears to the perpetrator no way out

except to commit a violent act. There is normally the presence of others who encourage

either side, and the context is normally a casual one – in a bar, in the home, in leisure

time – places where the perpetrator may have felt that they could escape the humiliations

of everyday life. In order to commit the crime, the perpetrator needs to turn humiliation

into a hot rage; although they are different emotions, they share the common experience

of a sense of loss of control, which means that one can convert to the other.

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Katz’s analysis also extended to minor crimes. In one chapter he explores what he calls

‘sneaky thrills’ – non-violent minor property crime, such as shoplifting, believed to be

perpetrated mostly by adolescents. Katz argued that it was not possible to understand this

type of crime as being driven by material need in most cases, as it was a crime committed

by all social classes; rather the undertaking of this kind of crime was, for Katz,

‘eminently magical’ (1988, p.54). The context of the crime – the store, for example – is a

place where individuals are transported out of the mundane, they are entranced and

seduced by objects, which they then, through strategic cunning, evade store assistants and

security guards to convey out of the store, after which the perpetrator feels a thrill not

unlike orgasm. What underpins the thrill of this crime is that it is a kind of ‘secret

deviance’; the perpetrator has been able to hide his or her deviance behind a veneer of

normality (presenting themselves as a ‘normal’ shopper). For young people, this has an

appeal because their lives are so public (family and school offers no privacy). Therefore:

The young shoplifter…puts the perceptions of adults to a series of tests. By

discovering that clerks and house detectives in department stores cannot prove that

she has deviant intentions, the young shoplifter may acquire confidence that adults

cannot detect that she harbours other forms of deviant spirit, shameful inclination, or

personal incompetence (Katz 1988, p.66).

Katz’s research and analysis put him at odds with much of criminological theory. Katz is

arguing, on the one hand, that people do not necessarily commit crime out of material

need, or peer group influence, or other social causative reasons; nor, on the other, does he

argue that people commit crimes because of rational calculation, as the adherents of

rational choice theory would argue. Deviant impulses are viewed by Katz as more

Thinking about crime Study the case above and Katz arguments about why people commit these types of crimes. What is it about the case that reflects the ideas of humiliation and righteousness that Katz believes lies at the core of homicide?

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widespread than we think, and moreover emotionally driven, tapping in to some basic

drives and feelings that all humanity share regardless of their gender, ethnicity, class or

any other social marker. In the following box Katz’s critique of theory of crime and the

social structure is examined in more detail.

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Katz on method, social structure and crime Katz argued that modern societies attempt to civilise or rationalise crime by reducing it to social or psychological causation, a tendency he regarded as ‘twentieth-century sentimentality’ (1988, p.314). He did not dispute that these might be relevant (for Katz, they affect the ‘form’ rather than the ‘drive’ to deviance), but objected to the way in which the discussion had, in his words, become ‘back to front’ (1988, p.312) and in doing so had lost all connection to the ‘lived experience of criminality’ (ibid, p.311), its ‘moral emotions’ (1988, p.312). Proponents of the rationalist approach took as their starting point a particular theory, and used that to explain a crime, rather than the other way around. For Katz, it was important to start with the ‘foreground, attempting to discover common or homogenous criminal projects and to test explanations of the necessary and sufficient steps through which people construct given forms of crime’ (Katz 1988, p.213) and this held for deviant behaviours at all levels of the social hierarchy, from the street hustler to the corrupt politician (although, data is more difficult to find on the latter as they do not talk about their crimes, or rarely). In his concluding chapter to Seductions of Crime, he focused on Merton as an exemplar of the sentimental approach. Merton had held that deviance is produced by a contradiction between culture norms and structure (class) on the social system and as such strain and therefore deviance was most likely to be experienced in the lower classes (see chapter 3). Cloward and Ohlin used opportunity theory to explain crime and in particular gang cultures. Katz objected to the universalistic thrust of this theory, as it discounted variations and deviations from the model. In relation to gangs, for example, he suggested that evidence showed that serious gang involvement often started before the age where conflicts over opportunity and strain became apparent. Moreover, material gain was not the prime motivation; as he argued ‘…even in desperately poor areas, adolescent thieves turn to theft for emotionally compelling rather than materially necessary reasons’ (1988, p.78). He argued that there was a degree of collusion between the right and the left in maintaining the sentimental approach to crime: the right because it was keen to lay social problems at the door of the lower classes; the left because they used the poverty and marginalisation argument to win resources for poor communities. More broadly, he suggested that the neat specification of crime as located in one or other forms of causation, eases social anxiety:

Without the claim that background conditions breed the motivation to deviance, criminological theory would not serve the high priestly function of transforming diffuse anxiety about chaos into discreet problems that are confined to marginal segments of social life. Indeed, the research agenda implied by a theory that relates material conditions to the form of quality of deviance but not to its incidence or prevalence is profoundly disquieting. (1988, p.317).

Katz advocated a comparative criminology where common patterns could be sought across the social hierarchy, and the common factor that united crimes were that they all, in some way, involved ‘emotional processes that seduce people to deviance – it is much less clear that the quality of the dynamic differs by social position’ (1988, p.312). When considered in this way:

Like the bad nigger who, refusing to be a “chump” like others of his humbled class and ethnicity, draws innocent blood to construct a more self-respecting career that leads predictably to prison confinement, the Western democracies, still seduced by the colonial myth of omnipotence, must again and again strike down thousands…Perhaps in the end, what we find so repulsive about studying the reality of crime…is the piercing reflection we catch when we steady our glance at these evil men (1988, p.324).

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Reformulating Katz: the criminology of transgression and late

modernity

Within criminology, there have been two distinct types of radical criminology: one from

Howard Becker and other writers in his orbit, who wrote from an interactionalist

perspective influenced by American pragmatism, the other from Jock Young, Stuart Hall

and others who, influenced by Marxism, emphasised the need to understand deviance and

labelling through power. A core debate that illustrates this distinction occurred between

Alvin Gouldner and Becker. Similar contradictions have arisen within cultural

criminology, though perhaps not openly. Katz, coming from a more interactionalist and

phenomenological standpoint, rejected social structure as influencing anything other than

the form of crime. Its motivation was something different however; more primordial and

uncivilised, less rational. As cultural criminology has emerged into a more systematised

discipline, it has, to some degree, rejected this aspect of Katz in favour of a structuralist

analysis in which ‘late modernity’, and the social and cultural forms it throws up, is

utilised as an explanatory tool for understanding the emotional drive of crime.

Late modernity Late modernity describes a transition to postmodernity - a description given to advanced Western societies whose social systems are no longer based on production of goods (those activities having moved to the developing world, particularly China, Taiwan, India, and so on) but on the mass consumption of goods, whether this be financial, services, cultural or media-related goods. This is underpinned by the dominance of the financial services that circulate money-products globally, financial speculation, and symbolic industries such as the mass media and other forms of cultural production - also globally interconnected. Central to late modernity, then, is the global movement of finance, culture and people that has been summarised as ‘globalisation’. The rise of the global ‘free market’ in goods, culture and people has signalled a retreat by national government in their attempt to control and regulate societies and economies – government attempts to over tax or over-regulate business, finance and labour markets will entail the movement of production elsewhere. It has also had an impact on everyday cultures; mass consumption, fuelled by credit, is perhaps a recent casualty of late modern society, but the interest in goods and the status they seem to offer has not yet diminished. The change from production-based economy to a consumption-based one has been dramatic particularly in the UK. It is also the case that the UK has the highest number of cultural industries compared to other nations. It has been obvious to sociologists and latterly criminologists that as a consequence, social organisation, our wants and needs, even our nature, will change when what we do for the dominant part of our lives also changes. Young (2007) for example, identifies these changes as mass migration and mass tourism, the flexible labour market and the consequent fragmentation of communities and traditional family forms, the rise of virtual realities through the internet, the globalisation of culture through the export and import of media products, mass consumerism and the celebration of individualism, choice and spontaneity as personal ideals.

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The reframing of Katz occurred most explicitly with the publication of a pivotal article by

Jock Young in 2003 entitled Merton with Energy, Katz with Structure: The Sociology of

Vindictiveness and the Criminology of Transgression. In this article the role of cultural

criminology in highlighting the expressive – meaning emotional - quality of crime is

emphasized in a critique of the rationalistic approaches. It specifically examines the

problem of the way on which populations are distributed, included and excluded by new

norms operating within contemporary societies and particularly contemporary cities,

which has profound impacts upon cultural forms and social ideas. The article also locates

the expressive quality of crime and social punitivity within the social structures and

cultural manifestations of late modernity:

What is of great importance about this investigation into the existential foreground of crime is that it reveals the intensity of motivation and links this to a background of a world where pleasure has to be seized despite the intense commodification of consumer culture, where control must be struggled for in a situation of ever increasing rationalization and regulation and where identity is threatened by the instability of social narratives (Young 2003, p.391).

Young ties his analysis down to a Mertonian framework in which in late modernity

greater cultural inclusion is juxtaposed to intensified structural exclusion:

…within the period of late modernity the mass media, mass education and the

consumer and labour markets have, in particular, increased exponentially. Each of

these institutions is not only a strong advocate of inclusive citizenship, it is also

paradoxically the site of exclusion. The consumer markets propagate a citizenship of

joyful consumption yet the ability to spend (and sometimes even to enter) within the

mall is severely limited, the labour market incorporates more and more of the

population (the entry of women into paid work being the prime example) yet, as

Andre Gorz (1999) has so astutely stressed, precisely at the time when work is seen

as a prime virtue of citizenship, well paid, secure and meaningful work is restricted

to a tiny minority (2003, p.397).

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Young outlines a series of adaptations that have occurred in response to this

contradiction: discontent and resentment at the bottom of the social structure alongside

an enthusiastic embracing of contemporary culture (the cult of celebrity, instant

gratification), fear and ‘vindictiveness’ (of and against the poor, particularly their

enthusiasm for contemporary culture) in some sections of the middle-classes expressed

through campaigns against crime, single mothers, and so forth, a contented and

insulated middle-class, insecurity and disquiet expressed in many different ways in

society – all of which are emotional reactions to a structural problem. In this way

Young moves outside of the way that Katz problematised social structure in analyses

of crime. As he argues of Katz:

…in his correct emphasis on the neglected foreground of infraction, the heightened

mental state of the offender, he rejects the structural background, any such

determinism he sees as a gross materialism, a liberal apologia which attempts to link

too easily structural poverty to crime—bad background to bad behaviour. I think

Katz throws the baby out with the bath water, simply to invert the conventional

wisdom by highlighting agency and rejecting structure. Our job is to emphasize both

structure and agency and trace how each constitutes the other…(2003, p.408).

Therefore, the way in which cultural criminology has developed is to utilise the

foreground of Katz ideas of crime as expressive, whist locating this expressiveness in

the social changes associated with late modernity, and how they have altered patterns

of social control, crime, violence and transgression (Ferrell et al. 2008).

Thinking about crime Make a list of the core differences between Katz and Young’s arguments concerning crime emotional expressiveness and social structure. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and what do you think are the consequences of each for crime policy? In particular, you may wish to think further about the argument by Katz that embedding an understanding of crime in social structure is an expression of ‘sentimentality’, and how Young might counter that argument.

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The remainder of this chapter will explore the structural manifestation of cultural

criminology as it has sought to embed its analysis in the social and cultural changes

brought about by late modernity.

Cultural criminology and late modernity

Late modernity, as suggested by the task set in the box above, influences both

behaviours and how societies are ordered, or ‘disordered’. If economically

governments resist the impulse to regulate markets (and the failure to regulate has

been one of the emergent discussions arising from the global economic downturn

from 2008) and culturally the population is orientated towards over-consumption of

Thinking about crime The television series ‘Big Brother’, developed and then franchised by the media production company Endemol, achieved mass popularity in approximately 70 countries across the world. It derived from an interplay with George Orwell’s novel, Big Brother, which portrayed a dystopian society where every move was surveilled and controlled by ‘The Party’ with its figurehead of ‘Big Brother’. Specifically, the novel highlights the television screen, which can see into practically all parts of an individual’s house, as well as displaying broadcasts from Big Brother. The television series played on different aspects of that dystopian vision: the cameras in practically all parts of the ‘Big Brother’ house surveilling the housemates every move, the instructions and orderings from ‘Big Brother’ (simply, one of the production team), and, in a contemporary ironic twist on our ‘confessional’ age, a separate room where contestants could ‘talk’ privately to Big Brother and, of course, (if the production team allowed) the viewer at home. The difference between the novel and the series was that in many ways, we, the viewer, became Big Brother – the ones surveilling the house and ‘voting’ on contestant’s removal. The show was made more poignant by the fact that, as a society, we were becoming more surveilled by CCTV and other observation methods on the one hand (see chapter eight), and we were also becoming more interested in the instant gratification gains of celebrity on the other. Big Brother as a show was seen to be conditioning or naturalising people to being observed, while also offering a route to instant celebrity – no talent required. Think about what you have read about the culture of late modernity, and make a list of what features of big brother you think symbolise it. In some ways the relevance is obvious (for example consumption, status and celebrity culture); in other ways it is less so – in particular, how late modernity interacts with social order.

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luxury and consumer goods, this has a profound impact on the way that society sees

itself and in particular the way that it is ordered.

How does cultural criminology more broadly attempt to explain what has been

referred to as the criminogenic nature of late modernity, meaning that the social

conditions created by our society have particularly implications for criminal, deviant

and transgressive activity. In this section this chapter will explore two themes of

interest to criminologists: firstly, the development of a culture of punitivity and

violence in societies and institutions; secondly, the growing importance of the media

as a mediator of social reality, creating a hazy boundary between fantasy and the

‘real’. It should be noted that, in outlining these two core themes, theorists and

authors who do not necessarily regard themselves as cultural criminologists per se

will be drawn upon – reflecting another of cultural criminology’s aspirations to

create a more interdisciplinary study of crime (Ferrell et al. 2008).

The culture of punitivity and violence

Within criminological thinking there has been a growing interest in what has been called

the ‘punitivity thesis’, the idea that within late modern societies and the institutions of

criminal justice and welfare there is a culture of punitive punishment (Garland 2001).

Rather than trying to resolve social problems though the elimination of poverty, social

marginalisation and a redistribution of wealth, our society prefers to endorse growing

social inequality, leading to poverty, a sense of exclusion marginalisation and envy, and

all the behaviours and problems associated with this. How are social problems then

resolved – the answer is by the use of imprisonment and other forms of social

containment to isolate and render invisible problem populations. How this occurs can be

seen in the treatment of African American males. Loïc Wacquant (2008) argues in the

American context that there was a close association between the failure of traditional

routes to maintain the exclusion of African Americans and the rise of US prison rates.

This massive expansion of imprisonment and other techniques of surveillance, he argues,

has less to do with crime rates – the official means by which government decides on the

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viability of crime control techniques and which in any case fell slightly during the period

of expansion dating from 1973 – and more to do with changing official attitudes towards

poverty and the general disorderliness normally associated with deprivation.

A key point to understand here is the interaction between punitive cultures and poverty,

one reinforcing the other, so that punitivity further marginalises the poor on the one hand

but marginalisation breeds more violence on the other. What makes this example

pertinent to cultural criminology is exactly the interest in the interaction between culture

and agency, and how this can enable us to understand violence, both from below and

above, and from institutions and the state.

Violence, for cultural criminologists, carries with it both the implication of the

enforcement of power, but also enhances this through its representational quality; as

argued, ‘violence often carries this sort of communicative power; the pain it inflicts is

both physical and symbolic, a pain of public degradation as much as physical

domination’ (Ferrell et al. 2008, p.11). An example offered by these authors is that of the

Thinking about crime Read the following extract from Wacquant (2005, p.15). What is the relationship he is making between a culture of punitivity and the nature of poverty and marginalisation in late capitalism?

What has changed during the intervening decades, then, is not the frequency and character of criminal activity but the attitude of the society and the responses of the authorities toward street delinquency and its principle source, urban poverty concentrated in the big cities. Since the about-turn of the mid-1970s, the carceral system of the United States serves not only to repress crime: it also has for its mission to bolster the social, racial and economic order via the punitive regulation of the behaviours of the categories prone to visible and offensive deviance because they are relegated to the bottom of a polarising class and caste structure. The prison has been called upon to contain the disorders generated by the rising tide of dispossessed families, street derelicts, unemployed and alienated youths, and the desperation and violence that have accumulated and intensified in the segregated urban core of the metropolis as the ‘safety net’ if the US semi-welfare state was torn, and desocialized wage-labour in the low wage service sectors was made the normal horizon of work for deskilled fractions of the working class.

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torture committed by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (see chapter one and

above). Acts of torture were not only committed, they were also filmed, and this added a

dimension to the nature of the violence. On the one hand, the photographs were part of

the torture, and indeed enhanced it; on the other, the soldiers’ use of the photographs

suggested a normalising of torture – the photos were something to send home, a form of

tourism. So, while violence always had a symbolic quality to it, there is something

distinct about the way that contemporary culture interacted with the events at Abu

Ghraib, much in the same way that teenagers film random acts of violence they have

committed on their mobile phones. And both examples illustrate the way that technology

also enhances the capacity to get caught.

Media, representation and fantasy

Critical criminological perspectives have sought to highlight the importance of the

media in the portrayal of crime and deviance. Cohen analysed the role of the media

in creating moral panics, themes developed in critical criminology of the 1970s and

1980s. Cultural criminologists have also harnessed these themes, as the previous

section outlined, arguing that in late modernity the media has moved from important

to centre state in framing crime, deviance as well as identity and social

consciousness. To some cultural criminologists, it is no longer possible to separate

the worlds of the ‘real’ and those manufactured by the media; all social forms and

social conflicts are channelled through media representation (Ferrell and Sanders

1995b). To return again to the example of Big Brother, in 2007 the show was caught

up in the politics of race, beginning in Celebrity Big Brother with a display of racial

abuse by Jane Goody et al. on Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood actress. Channel 4 and

Endemol, the company making the show, were accused of ignoring racist behaviour

and failing to act. Hence, in Big Brother in the summer of 2007, the show responded

to a dubious and racist display of ‘street cool’ by contestant Emily Parr by throwing

her out of the house. A social conflict about racism was entirely channelled through

a media form, and a solution proposed, outside the realm of economic

discrimination, racially aggravated crime and injustices in the criminal justice

17

system that ethnic minorities face daily (see chapter five). Moreover, the number of

complaints about racism sent by the public was viewed in the media as evidence that

Britain was a tolerant society, belying evidence to the contrary, for example, in

attitudes towards immigration. In a further twist, Jane Goody was ‘resurrected’ by

appearing on the Indian version of Celebrity Big Brother in 2008, during which she

learnt that she was suffering from cervical cancer. Her subsequent illness and death

was played out in the public gaze through the media (during which she earned over

$1million for her two sons), and she was compared by British actor Stephen Fry as a

‘kind of Princess Diana from the wrong side of the tracks’ (Washington Post

22/3/09).

Ferrell et al. (2008) portray the relationship between ‘media’ and ‘reality’ as a series

of ‘loops’ and ‘spirals’. The loop describes the process by which:

…everyday life recreates itself in its own image…a late modern world in which the

gritty, on-the-ground reality of crime, violence and everyday criminal justice is

dangerously confounded with its own representation (2008, p. 130).

In other words, the reality of crime and criminal justice – what happens in everyday

life and institutions, becomes entirely caught up with the way in which it is

represented in the media, to the extent that the media is able to control the material

process of criminal justice itself. On the one hand, the authors offer the example of

Kate Moss, who, after being filmed snorting cocaine, found her career in ruins

because of a media backlash. In playing the role of ‘penitent’ she was then portrayed

sympathetically by the media, and then found herself in demand again, with a new

public image as the ‘odd but marketable embodiment of edgy, street savvy, and

redemptive’ (ibid, p.131). On the other, they suggest the example of O.J.Simpson

who was convicted in the press before the courtroom, an example of ‘cultural

criminalisation’.

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Loops however are contained episodes that may or may not be part of a longer

process of what Ferrell et al. refer to as ‘spirals’. Moral panics can continue

indefinitely as part of a process of mutual confirmation and ‘self-fulfilling prophecy.

An example they offer is the criminalisation of drugs, originating in America around

the turn of the twentieth century onwards. The moral panic over drugs and the

labelling of ‘addicts’ exacerbates addiction by reinforcing marginalisation and

embedding deviance, which the authorities respond to by further criminalisation,

resulting in the ‘war on drugs’ – with international consequences. Political careers

are built on being ‘tough on drugs’ (and destroyed by the media if politicians are

seen as ‘soft’ on drugs, crime, terrorism and so forth). Most crime is portrayed as

‘drug related’. Drug use becomes more edgy; an edgy-ness often harnessed by media

and cinema. And so it goes on – a ride no-one can get off, an framed reality

impossible to challenge or change.

Mythen and Walklate (2006) similarly examined the portrayal of media images of

so-called terrorists and their presentation as inhuman – a cultural ‘other’ – on

everyday life. They argued that the political discourses that aimed to convey the

‘terror threat’ have produced fear and uncertainty, increased racism directed at the

‘terrorist other’, and encouraged responsibilisation through ‘personal avoidance

strategies’ that harness psychological awareness about dangerous people, spaces and

activities, for example, avoiding ‘risky’ people and places. These social fears have

translated more broadly into notions of pre-emptive action or preventative war,

undermining ideas embedded in international law that seek to proscribe the

conditions around which war can be initiated. This example confirms the analysis

proposed by Ferrell & Sanders (1995b, p302-3) that:

Thinking about crime Think about the conceptual distinction made by Ferrell et al. between loops and spirals. Can you think of any media stories and processes that fit these two concepts?

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…contemporary authority – and indeed contemporary social order – is

constructed out of an endless interplay of images, out of the hyper-real politics

of representation and identity. This orientation, in turn, suggests that

contemporary legal authority rests on media operations and symbolic crusades,

that crime and criminality incorporate subtleties of style and representational

meaning…

A different vision of how fantasy and reality are being blurred is through the

growing use of virtual worlds such as Second Life. The website of Second Life

states that:

Second Life is a 3D digital world imagined, created and owned by its

Residents… Second Life is the size of a small city, with thousands of servers

(called simulators) and a Resident population of over 7,148,028 (and growing).

Residents come to the world from over 100 countries with concentrations in

North America and the UK. Demographically, 60% are men, 40% are women

and they span in age from 18 - 85. They are gamers, housewives, artists,

musicians, programmers, lawyers, firemen, political activists, college students,

business owners, active duty military overseas, architects, and medical doctors,

to name just a few. There are even a fair number who make part or all of their

real world living by being a creator in Second Life…(www.secondlife.com)

Second Life is a virtual world where it is possible to buy (using conventional money)

and use a virtual currency – called Linden Dollars – to trade, buy property and land,

even an island. As the above quote suggests, some individuals make a living out of

trading in virtual reality. The appeal of virtual reality, and this is also true of the

more conventional formats of chat rooms and discussion forums, is that it is possible

to remake ones identity (ones avatar can be more attractive, stylish and more

successful that real life) and experience a level of consumption and freedom not

possible for most in ‘real life’, albeit in a world that still prioritises property and

consumption as a social goal.

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The fantasy world of Second Life interacts with transgression in particular ways. It is

possible to work as a stripper, engage in sexual affairs, visit violent worlds for rape

and pillage or simply hang out in a Grateful Dead commune, all of which is regarded

as consensual. Less consenting forms of transgression (or simply crime) was the

discovery that paedophiles were trading in child pornography on Second Life, and

even paying to have virtual sex with children (or child avatars) resulting in

expulsions from the site (Marie Clare 9/07). Another popular fantasy site is World of

Warcraft where ‘thousands of players adventure together in an enormous, persistent

game world, forming friendships, slaying monsters, and engaging in epic quests that

can span days or weeks’ (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/faq/general.html).

The cultural engagement with crime does not end with the actual transgressor, however.

In many ways, crime and violence has become a spectacle that produces great excitement

for the watching public (Presdee 2000). Whether it is CSI or Crimewatch UK, people are

interested in crime and the gory details of and connections to the underworld. Much has

been made, for example, of the glorification of violence in computer games, with the US

military releasing its own versions for public sale (Ferrell et al. 2008). Commenting on

the vast array of computer games that enthral teenagers with violence, Neal (2010) argues

that:

…violent gaming in cyber environments cannot be easily separated from real world

social relations and second, that violent gaming in virtual environments unsettles and

disrupts normative notions of violence and harm. The frisson, the pleasures and the

extent of the engagement with violent gaming raises questions as to what constitutes

violence and harmful behaviours and how this may intersect – or not – with its status

and meaning in real world settings.

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Late modernity and the impulse towards crime and

transgression

J.G.Ballard, a fiction writer, wrote a book in 1997 titled Cocaine Nights, which

depicted a wealthy ex-pat community living on a Spanish Coast overcome by

boredom and lack of purpose. One individual transforms this, by engaging them in

affairs, rape, theft, arson and murder, thus inculcating a sense of vigour and purpose

to the community, although it was a thoroughly immoral and destructive one that is

eventually dissipated. What underpinned this story was an examination of a society

that had gone beyond need and survival, but that affluence had produced its own

problems. Rather that being able to engage in purposeful activity (creative work, for

example) the community turned to crime and violence to re-engage with life.

Affluence produced barbarism.

In many ways, this book is a literary version for what many cultural criminologists

are trying to understand. Emotional expressiveness in the commission of

transgression is tied specifically to the social forms exemplifying late modernity, for

example, the emphasis in contemporary western economies on consumption. The

culture of consumption that exemplifies late modernity produces a range of new

feelings and behaviours that might be considered unhelpful in other eras – greed,

instant gratification, dishonesty and disloyalty – all prompted by a desire to have

Thinking about crime Websites such as Second Life and violent computer gaming raise questions about the development of teenagers and the extent to which such facilities should be regulated. Critics of the site say that they are harmful, as the above quote by Neal suggests, but this is countered by the argument that young people (and adults) can understand the difference between reality and fantasy, and the two do not impinge on each other. What do you think?

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beyond other considerations. Anything can be bought and sold, including love,

religion, health, education and security (Presdee 2000).

So far, we have talked about the empathetic structures generated by affluence. The

same social structures can, however, produce wildly different responses. The culture

of late modernity interacts with our emotions in ways that suggest a suppressing of

human feelings. As the social psychologist Erich Fromm argued as early as 1978 in

To Have or To Be, what we were witnessing in modern consumption orientated and

bureaucratic societies was not just alienation from any sense of ownership of society

and close connection with reality, but a disconnection from ourselves. Late modern

societies suppressed human feeling in its desire for uniformity of experience. As he

argued, ‘the real crisis today is one that is unique in human history: it is the crisis of

life itself’ (1978:221).

Presdee (2000), for example, drawing upon Bakhtin’s idea of the ‘second life of the

people’ – that part of life untouched by an all encompassing state and scientific

rationality, unknowable by them and viewed as immoral, irrational, uncivilised and

obscene - argues that transgression is a reaction to rationality. Emotions, the

creative, rebellion, even crime itself become a way of reacting against the stifling

nature of control in the contemporary west. For example, a central part of popular

culture in the UK historically has been the carnival, the village fair, and other mass

popular cultural events in public spaces. These were a core part of the culture of the

peasantry and even the emergent working-class, but were demobilised by law and

policing (Storch 1974). For Bakhtin and Presdee, the carnival or these public events

allow people can express their second selves – the need for excitement, fun, pleasure

and sensuality, as well as bawdiness and rebellion. Yet they are disallowed in

modern societies. ‘Without a partly licensed carnival to satisfy our second life’,

Presdee argues, ‘it emerges more haphazardly, unrehearsed and often unannounced’

(2000, p.46). As such, it emerges in such diverse transgressions as extreme sports

(Lyng 2004), drug taking, binge drinking (Measham and Brain 2005), or the

manifestations of boredom (Ferrell 2004).

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Lyng: ‘edgework’ and embodiment Stephen Lyng developed the concept of ‘edgework’ to describe what is occurring when individuals voluntarily engage in risky activities such as extreme sports, drug-taking, joy-riding and performative street styles (Hayward 2004) and other practices liable to be harmful to the self. He argued that cultural criminology had to take an ‘embodied approach’ (Lyng 2004, p.360) meaning to explore the way that bodies expressed the contradictions of late modernity. As he argues:

A central claim in this analysis is that most aspects of criminal life highlighted by cultural criminology—the pursuit of risk, pleasure, style and empowerment—are ways to ‘body forth’ in a social context where actors are subjected to regimes of work, consumption and communication that deny the creative possibilities of their bodies… the transcendent practices involved in negotiating the edge are wholly embodied in nature and acquire their transcendent power in the context of a social and cultural reality that privileges the mind, discursive practices and rationality over the body, the nondiscursive and the nonrational (ibid, p. 360).

What happens when people engage in such risk taking activities is that they suspend their rational thinking selves, bound by social norms, and are forced to act in the moment; in this context, they become self-determining – having to use their bodies with skill in order to control the situation, or, as Ferrell et al. (2008, p.72) put it, ‘they lose control to take control’. The context of this kind of activity is late modernity, which shuts off the possibility of freedom by the increasing bureaucracy, control and routine of everyday life, particularly for bodily expression. These ideas have also been expressed in film. Nicolas Klotz’s Heartbeat Detector (2008) explores the dualistic world of the corporation, where the hypercontrol of the corporate world over its employees is counterposed to their fantastical debauchery at evenings and weekends, a dualism described as fascistic at the films close.

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Late modernity and boredom Jeff Ferrell, in an article entitled Boredom, crime and criminology, explores how boredom underpins social experience from the eighteenth century and the beginnings of the routinisation and industrialisation of everyday life. It is at this point, for example, that work began to be organised according to the rule of time – the factory requiring that workers clock on and off at specific times. With the routinisation of work comes the routinisation of leisure, as social life in late modernity becomes increasingly packaged, commodified, and homogenised, despite the fact it seems to promise the fulfilment of desire and fantasy. Ferrell offers us an analysis of the way in which social organisation – in this case the routine of work, leisure and bureaucracy characteristic of modern and late modern societies, produces boredom. There are various ways to react to this boredom – note here that he refers to Merton’s modes of adaptation that we examined in chapter three – and this includes despair and apathy, political resistance, or crime. He cites an early example of political resistance:

Even as Taylor and Ford were calibrating their instruments of organized boredom, radical movements like the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), for example, were already organizing against them…the Wobblies utilized sabotage to interrupt work’s mind-numbing repetition. Similarly, the Wobblies employed poems, parables, songs, jokes, parodies and cartoons in their everyday organizing, sang bawdy Wobbly hymns during strikes and street fights, staged pageants. The Wobblies were, by intention, not boring (ibid., p.292).

Contemporary movements, such as Critical Mass and Reclaim the Streets aim to disrupt the flow of normality by taking over public spaces to organise parties and in doing so ‘salvage city streets from automotive traffic and to reinstate instead public life founded on fluid, face-to-face community’ (Ferrell 2004, p.288). Situationalists, who were cultural radicals in the 1960s, similarly tried to imagine what a community not organised around traffic and commerce might look like, and indeed tried to find spaces that stood outside of contemporary time and space, creating possibilities for communal and resistant forms of human interaction (Sadler 1998). There are other forms of resistance, however, that take more of a cultural than political form. In this respect Ferrell, citing Lyng, refers to skydiving, speeding, graffiti – all of which can be either semi-illicit or repackaged as a commodified leisure. They form the basis, however, along with other activities such as drug-taking, theft, violence and murder as in some way protests against boredom, as participants search for feeling and excitement. We might consider here the homeless, often seen as victims, but in fact often wedded to a life that allows freedom of movement and a ‘second life’ and the possibility of human engagement outside of the contemporary normality of work, family and consumption, favoured despite the palpable dangers (which are seen as tests or survival). Such an analysis gets to the heart of what cultural criminology is for – to investigate and describe the life world of normality and those that stand outside of it – and not assume, in the latter case and if we return again to the example of the homeless, that everybody has similar life goals if only they were offered the opportunity of realising them (Young 2007).

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The application of cultural criminology to policy and

research

Underpinning the thrust of this chapter is a description of a new development within

criminological thinking that is critical in its orientation. It is understandable therefore that

outside of academia cultural criminology has not, and possibly doesn’t seek to, break into

policy circles beyond being influential in a more general sense on political, cultural and

social sensibilities. As we have already illustrated, however, this approach, along with

other radical and critical thinking around cities and the nature of public space, leisure,

commodification and sanitisation, crime, transgression and violence, offers an

explanation for the motivation behind crime and transgression and in addition why forms

of punishments and deterrents don’t work, because crime and rule-breaking has its own

excitement, or that punishments such as Anti-social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) or

electronic tagging simply become symbols of honour, celebrated and subverted.

More broadly, as ethnographic research has always done, it offers an insight into other

worlds that construct different meanings. This is relevant for policy, which is orientated

largely towards conformity to standard social goals of work, family and consumption.

That there should be subcultures and even a broad set of cultural mores that do not

conform to those goals should offer solutions to professionals engaged in anything from

social to youth work. If many groups and individuals in society do not want the same

things, and indeed have radically different ways of thinking, behaving and living, what

does this mean for a welfare and criminal justice system orientated towards enabling and

rehabilitating individuals to achieve standard social objectives. As Jock Young describes

of the liberal, helping subjectivity:

Liberal othering focuses largely on the poor constituted as an underclass, who are

seen as being a fairly homogenous group. The poor are seen as disconnected from

us, they are not part of our economic circuit: they are an object to be pitied, helped,

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avoided, studied, but they are not in a social relationship with us…Their crime and

deviance is the main focus of the othering, their ‘normal’ activities, for example their

pattern of work and legal informal economies, are rendered invisible (e.g. the

working poor). Their deviance is seen as a product of this deficit that can be

remedied through education and the opportunity of work so as to make up the

shortfall of the deficit.’ (2007, p.5-6).

Policy therefore focuses on the poor, along with other social groups, as different and

deficient, needing to be helped by the standard route of the middle-class to success -

education and work. That there may be other ways of living that might appear

uncomfortable or unattractive to the middle-class, but nevertheless have their own rules

and ways of living that work for those involved, is ignored. It is obvious that

ethnographic research might offer a way to understand these lifeworlds, as well as why

real and embedded cultural differences of behavioural difference is not tolerated in the

economic, social, economic and spatial landscape (Haywood 2004, Talbot 2007).

This is also the case with the global faultlines of cultural difference, terrorism, war

(Mooney and Young 2004) and the equally ‘irrational’ response of cultural punitivity.

Mark Hamm, who will be more closely examined at the end of this chapter, outlined an

approach to the prevention and detection of terrorism, based upon data from official

records and reports, interviews with investigators, intelligence analysts and law

enforcement personnel, and trial transcripts and other court documents. Through this

analysis, Hamm argued that the link between terrorism and crime is key. In the context of

the end of the Cold War, terrorism was less often sponsored by states, meaning that

perpetrators had to commit crime in order to gain the resources for acts of terror. He

examined two brands of terrorist: firstly, Islamic Jihadists and domestically based (to the

USA) right-wing terror groups. In terms of the former, they could often be detected by

the fact that they were ‘inexperienced criminals – sometimes staggeringly so’ (Hamm

2007, p.17). With the latter, the Achilles Heel was a desire to be famous and thereby

rendering themselves visible. As Hamm argues, ‘they present themselves to the world as

entertainers, thereby turning terrorism into a theatrical performance’ (2007., p.17). The

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policy implications of such insights are that firstly, terrorists could be caught by good

crime detection – as they commit traffic violations, robberies or drug deals, for example.

Secondly, that the process of prosecution could be utilised to produce intelligence, and,

thirdly, that there was a need to understand the ‘specific techniques’ (2007. p.19)

involved in the activities surrounding terrorism.

Critical approaches to cultural criminology

Although a very new approach to the study of crime, and very much in its infancy,

cultural criminology has attracted some new and some very familiar criticisms. This

section will outline three. Firstly, the difficulty in defining cultural criminology as a

disciplinary approach and research agenda, a reflexive criticism that has emerged

from within its own ranks. Secondly, that it is too political in its approach, and

indeed, its radical politics being all that does define it. Thirdly, that it excludes

women and gendered concerns from its orbit.

The lack of definition as a criminological approach

Cultural criminology, as already noted, is not a new theoretical or methodological

approach per se. Ferrell & Sanders (1995a, 1995b) argued that cultural criminology

was effectively an attempt to reformulate critical criminological approaches into a

research agenda in the context of the economic and social changes seen to have

occurred since. It borrowed from labelling perspectives by advocating an

ethnographic approach to the formation of a group criminal or deviant identities, and

particularly how style mediates those identities – the ‘aesthetics’ of crime (1995a,

Thinking about crime Reflect on what you have read so far. Can you think of any other ways in which cultural criminology could contribute to policy development, social change, and innovations in research?

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p.4). In terms of the approaches derived from critical criminology, cultural

criminology aimed to understand how cultural forms are criminalised by the

powerful, and how they themselves mobilise cultural meanings against the stylistic

formulations of subcultures. As they argue:

…the everyday practice of criminality and the criminalisation of everyday life

by the powerful are cultural enterprises and must be investigated as such

(1995a, p.7).

Martin O’Brien (2005) argued that one of the manifest failures of cultural criminology

has been an inability to define what is cultural, and therefore provide theoretical and

methodological boundaries for itself as a distinct approach, as well as a coherent

research agenda. It is not that the research is not worthy; it is merely that it has failed

to define itself as distinct from the long tradition of outsider studies’ (ibid, p.605).

Haywood and Young (2007, p. 103) similarly admit that ‘whilst this body of work has

made great strides in (re)directing the criminological 'imagination' towards the study of

culture, it remains the case that, despite many positive developments, the trajectories

and methods of cultural criminology have yet to be firmly established’.

In essence therefore, cultural criminology still inhabits an undefined research trajectory,

although various efforts are made to bring these together. As already seen in this chapter,

its focus can range from ethnographic account of scavenging (Ferrell 2004) to biographic

accounts of terrorism (Hamm 2004a) or self-biographic studies of deviance where one’s

own personal biography forms part of the study and intellectual orientation (Presdee

2000). The regulation of city spaces forms another key development in cultural

criminology and more broadly the way that culture and behaviour is shaped by ‘late

modern’ market culture (see below) characterised by the corrosion of traditional

institutional forms of family, work, church and community, where the culture of

consumption and celebrity dominates; types of city spaces are viewed as productive of

transgression, which may be considered in terms of the spatial dynamics of areas

(Hayward 2004) or as forms of behaviour, for example, in studies of ‘binge drinking’

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(Measham 2004, Measham and Brain 2005). The writings broadly seen as cultural

criminology also encompass political critique, whether of the status and meaning of the

internment camp at Guantanamo Bay or criticisms of the Patriot Act – the core piece of

anti-terror legislation in the US (Hamm 2004b). There is a hazy line, therefore between

the core aspects of cultural criminology and criminological critique in general, with all

located under one roof. As Young and Hayward argue, however, the lack of firm

trajectory is ‘as much a strength as a weakness….it self-consciously eludes any attempt at

static definition…’(2007, p.103).

Theoretical and methodological openness is to be valued, but even as an emergent

discipline it, unlike Katz, has yet to provide any insight into the meanings of some of the

core actors of transgression in particularly UK society, such as studies of youth gangs,

male and female, gang rape, the fantasy and act of political violence, new forms of

alternative culture, the meaning of nightlife, drinking and drug taking – in other words, to

give voice to those condemned as violent and disorderly. Perhaps this slowness in jump

starting critical ethnographic research is due, as Polsky might argue, to the various ways

in which criminologists can ‘cop out’ (1967, p.116) and that ‘most sociologists find it too

difficult or too distasteful to get near adult criminals except in jails or other anti-crime

settings, such as the courts and probation and parole systems’ (ibid., p117). It is also

possible that in-depth ethnographic research is proscribed by a narrowing social

background of younger academics, the tightening grip of ethics committees over difficult

and dangerous research (Katz 2007) and the time and costs involved in research of this

nature, making it a problematic option for research students already deeply in debt or

academics following the routine of teaching and publication.

Cultural criminology as a partisan project

As we have already discovered, cultural criminology is something of a moving target.

It might be possible to argue, as realists do, that it simply replicates all of the problems

of labelling and critical criminology in romanticising problem behaviour, such as

speeding, graffiti and more extreme forms of violence. Hinged on to this critique is the

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idea that cultural criminology is essentially a political project that is, as O’Brien

argues, ‘highly selective in defining what is and is not to count as elements of their

approach to the study of crime’ (2005, p.600). Some cultural explanations that are

conservative or realist in their orientation, such as control theory or routine activities

theory (see previous chapter) are excluded (although some researchers designated as

cultural criminologists have moved between theories, for example, Hamm’s more

recent work on terrorism), while other research that does not necessarily encompass the

cultural, but are nevertheless part of a political resistance to the politics of law and

order, incarceration, and war, are included.

O’Brien explores in particular Jeff Ferrell’s ethnographic account of graffiti artists in

Denver to illustrate an unsystematic approach to the study of culture. He argues that

Ferrell’s account of the practitioners of graffiti are detailed, sympathetic and

sentimental, whereas their opponents are not treated in the same systematic or

empathetic way:

Ferrell’s sensitive and celebratory exposition of a graffiti subculture turns into a

vehicle for engaging in ideology critique, where the mainstream, the conventional

citizenry, local state, media, business organisations (and all the other usual suspects

targeted by this political-intellectual enterprise) are represented either as cultural

dopes or as self-seeking, calculating moral entrepreneurs who manipulate ‘image

and ideology’ through the creation of a ‘moral panic’ (ibid.:133) in order to reinforce

their own social, economic and political power.’ (2005, p. 602-3).

For O’Brien, cultural criminology confronts the same problem highlighted by Alvin

Gouldner in relation to Becker, namely, that the ethnography does not get past the

‘zookeeper’ approach of viewing subjects as interesting objects of study whilst not

addressing problems of power. He suggests that the study of criminalisation might

serve as a better basis for research:

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Perhaps the ‘zoo keepers of deviance’ will always be a part of criminology and

perhaps it can be said that they perform a valuable role in making visible the

fascinating stylistics of certain criminal endeavours. However, whilst contemporary

zoos and nature reserves increasingly function as repositories of endangered genera,

criminology’s zoo keepers are more like Victorian collectors and cataloguers of the

abundance of deviant species. Cultural criminology might be best advised to

downgrade the study of deviant species and focus more attention on the generically

political character of criminalisation. When Mark Thatcher’s American visa is

granted and his passport quietly stamped instead of having his living conditions

penally cramped, criminology is duty bound to ask why anyone should care whether

Ferrell’s respondents smoke dope of cigars, drink vodka or wine, use red paint or

green (2005, p.610).

On the one hand therefore, cultural criminology is too partisan; and on the other, it

fails to take account of power and as such O’Brien at least struggled to find

relevance. Similar, Halsey and Young (2006) in their study of young graffiti writers

in Australia, argue that cultural criminology overestimates the degree to which

young people are reacting to the oppressiveness of capitalism, the thrill of breaking

the law, or transcendence. In the narratives of graffiti writers themselves, ‘When one

talks to writers about why they do what they do, the resulting narratives tend to hang

together around themes of respect, expression, design and quality of the image

(2006, p.292); in other words, it is more about skill then thrill.

Of course, ethnographic study has never claimed to be free from interpretive bias, as

it is difficult to engage the necessary sensitivity to the subject of the research without

involving oneself in their lifeworld, as the method of participant observation would

imply (Brewer 1998). In addition, as we have seen in previous chapters, an

attachment to objective science when ones object is the ‘social’ seems doomed to it’s

own bias – that of being defined and controlled by governmental priorities. In is

interesting that Ferrell himself makes no excuses for bias:

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The importation of ‘scientific’ methodologies into criminology in the hope of

positioning criminology as an objective social science of crime paralleled, in

consequence, the introduction of scientific management into the office and factory:

both resulted in the systematic dehumanization of those involved, and in the

institution of pervasive boredom. Just as the broader boredom of modernism results

from the reduction of human subjects to rationalized categories of work and

consumption, the boredom of mainstream criminology results in large part from

methodologies designed, quite explicitly, to reduce human subjects to carefully

controlled categories of counting and cross-tabulation. Just as the boredom of

modernism in turn stems from the systematic exhaustion of uncertainty and

possibility in everyday life, the boredom of mainstream criminology stems in large

part from methodologies designed, again quite explicitly, to exclude ambiguity,

surprise and ‘human error’ from the process of criminological research…Offering

researchers vulnerability, humility, danger and deep involvement with subjects of

study as well, such methodologies also serve to reclaim the criminological enterprise

from a courthouse criminology of scientific rationalization and methodological

objectification (2004, p.297).

In essence, what is being argued here is that a scientific method that assumes

humans can be statistically explained and categorised is inappropriate for a social

science. The ethnographic method is appositive precisely because it can examine

subjectivities, emotions and processes of change and causation (Young 2004). Being

involved with ones subjects, using the poetry of human experience, history,

aesthetics and literature to explain the social is not only more relevant, but more

interesting. And part of doing ethnography is to accept that there may be different

interpretations of the same phenomena; the critical question is, however, whether

there is enough ethnography being done to maintain such a creative discourse.

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The feminist critique

Cultural criminology is encompassed within some very old debates. We have already

seen how debates around social structure emergent in the 1960s and 1970s have

similarly impacted on this perspective. And just as labelling and critical perspectives

of that era were later viewed through the prism of feminist thought and gender so has

cultural criminology. To some degree this focus has always been institutional.

Processes of gender discrimination – particularly the designation of women’s

research as being of lesser status - exist in the academic institution regardless of the

practical inclusion of women. Moreover, there is confusion, as evidenced by the

critique of Smart between the degree to which gender is neglected as an important

refractive lens by which is it possible to analyse any social process including crime

and the lesser and distinct involvement of women in crime and deviance historically

(and combined with this the greater tendency of men to engage in crime and

violence). And finally, to add to this point, to what degree is greater equality for

women in society equalising social behaviours, so that the idea that one would have

a distinct ‘feminist’ or ‘female’ perspective on sociological trends, including crime,

deviance and transgression, is a misnomer? Or rather, what does it mean to analyse

the behaviours of women as somehow distinctive from that of men?

In the contemporary period, these trends exist in parallel and flux, influencing the

assessment of criminological developments, including cultural criminology. So

criticisms might be ranged against this perspective because of the palpable

dominance of men in the theorisation of the field, and the charge has been laid that

cultural criminology ‘ignores questions of class, race, ethnicity, and gender’, only

being ‘brought into the fold’ under the same preconditions as men; namely that

‘Girls, too, can have fun’ (Howe 2003, p.9). Yet women are engaged in cultural

criminological research (on both male and female behaviours). And there is a

problem with assessing how far gender is an important ‘lens’ when the kinds of

behaviours so far analysed implicate both men and women (Ferrell et al. 2008).

Perhaps it is an issue of degree. Katz, for example, in downplaying the role of social

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factors in the impulse towards crime, argued that it affected the form rather than the

content of crime. While there was a distinct difference in the rate of homicide

between men and women (a rate of 5:1), homicide committed within families tended

to more equal. The content of such homicides was each gender allowing traditional

gender roles of define their conduct, and in unexpected ways. For example, women’s

rage and violence, because it was unexpected (as the gender role for women

suggested a lack of anger and passivity), was quicker and less comprehensible to

them. Halsey and Young (2006) similarly caution against any crude application of

gendered notions to cultural phenomenon. In their study of graffiti writers, noted in

the previous section, they argue that it is important to study the life world from the

perspective of the participants, rather than through the lens of academic discourse;

and it was a world in which gender did not figure.

For Howe (2003), however, it is the absences from cultural criminology that speak louder

than claims of equity; so, for example, Katz and other cultural criminologists have not

explored issues of violence against women and the additional risks faced by the excluded

or oppressed. There have been some distinct gender analyses including those of violence

against women coming from within a cultural criminological conceptual framework.

Challenging the idea of women’s passivity in the face of domestic abuse, for example,

Rajah (2007, p.197) uses the concept of edgework to describe how a population of ‘poor,

drug-using, largely African-American and Puerto Rican women with habitually violent

male intimate partners’ resist ‘violent exploitation and patriarchal control’ even as they

choose to stay in the relationship. This takes the form of covert action using their bodies

skillfully to evade attack, as overt forms of resistance would encourage retaliation. Covert

forms are described as using knowledge of their partner to not provoke them, fantasising

about hurting their partner, using a - tougher - male friend to evade abuse, manipulating

men sexually, and using their weaknesses against them. For Rajah this research

demonstrates ‘how women author their own experiences even in the midst of extremely

oppressive situations’ (2007, p.209). However, the description of the women’s

‘resistances’ can hardly be a new idea to researchers of domestic violence; indeed, it

reads depressingly as a way of reposing the all too familiar behaviours associated with

35

oppression and in particular being on the receiving end of violence and abuse. Questions

can be raised therefore about both the value of the insights generated from this research

and also its moral ambiguity.

A case study of terrorism and the cultural impetus to

violence

One way in which cultural criminology differs from the radical deviancy theories

and critical criminology is its preparedness to extend its research and analysis into

extreme violence, for example, terrorism. The insights generated are opportune

given the events in New York on 11th September 2001 and in London 7th July 2005,

as well as the escalation of violence and civil war internationally. Clearly then there

is a pressing need to understand and research the causes of terrorism and political or

civil conflict. However, this approach has not informed government thinking (see

Hamm 2007), and up to 2009 the language used to describe terrorism, particularly

Islamic terrorism, appears to provoke more fear than understanding – raising

suspicions about ‘categories’ of people, in this case Muslims – that translates into

exclusionary policies and an escalation of violence (Mooney and Young 2004).

Arguments have abounded about the need to renegotiate civil liberties and the

operation of criminal justice, and promoting ambiguous attitudes towards migrants

(recognising their economic contribution but also the ‘risks’ to jobs, communities

and national security). As we saw earlier in this chapter through the work of Mark

Hamm (2007), an empirical study of terrorism would demonstrate that crime

Thinking about crime Do you agree with the idea that cultural criminology as an approach may have difficulty in engaging feminist perspectives on issues of gender, oppression and violence against women?

36

detection and prosecution is more relevant than broader debates about democracy

and migration.

In recent years it has been seemingly easy to identify terrorism with the Muslim other.

However, Hamm as we have already seen, conducted a study of the terrorist subculture in

its different manifestations in order to critically interrogate conventional readings of

terrorist activity. He argues that the content of terror groups is often summed up by the

concept of ‘apocalyptic violence’ – an ideology that promotes the idea of an upcoming

racial war that will sweep away the old decadence and purify mankind. Hamm argues

that this concept places too much emphasis in the ‘rational, strategically calculating and

politically instrumental’ nature of terrorist subcultures, contradicting the mass of

literature that explores their ‘irrational and emotional nature’ (2004a, p.325).

His research has centred on a wide range of terror groups, both international and Neo-

Nazi terror groups or subcultures, the latter responsible for the bombing of the Murrah

Federal Building in Oklahoma City in the US in 1995, killing 168 people.

For Hamm, conventional literature fails to explore the formation of the ideologies and

cultural symbols within the participants; as he argues, it has failed to put a human face on

the terrorist enterprise’ (ibid., p. 325). It also neglects how far the consciousness of the

participants is affected by the culture of the group – how ‘music, literature, symbolism

and style’ (ibid. p.326) bears responsibility for socialising individuals into the

commission of violent acts. While white terrorists share similar sociological facts, being

male, working class albeit with a range of different experiences (so that it cannot be said,

for example, that they have all suffered humiliation, abuse or some other defining violent

childhood experience), in the main what they have in common is exposure to the culture,

ideology and symbolism of terrorist subcultures.

These social facts and the ideological impetus that derives from cultural artefacts

comes together into a collective experience, a group consciousness, that allows

expressions of violence and hatred towards their enemies; in the case of the white

power groups, ‘blacks, gays, foreigners, Jewish institutions, etc.’ (ibid., p.327). This is

37

where, in essence, the methods of cultural criminology are important; to not just

understand the ideologies and background of terrorist subcultures, but how culture and

aesthetics plays a key part on the formation of violent subcultures. In order to explore

this, Hamm interviewed forty members of the Aryan Republican Army, far-right US

based group inspired by ‘far-right totalitarianism (Hitler’s Third Reich), far-left Irish

insurgency (the Irish Republican Party) and the ‘social banditry’ of the Jesse James

gang’ (ibid. 328), and a fundamentalist religion that upheld racist, sexist, and anti-

Semitic beliefs.

Hamm explored the case histories of two white power extremists in the US. Langan

and Stedeford came from very different backgrounds, the former suffering from a crisis

in sexual identity and a history of personal disorganisation, resulting in a prison

sentence, the latter being of a stable, conventional and hard working background. Both,

however, had been introduced to the literature and culture of white power, which,

alongside a desire to break rules and challenge, led to the commission of violent acts.

Ideology and aesthetics, therefore, were important understanding how they were

propelled towards this. The following describes the process for Langan:

Langan was paroled from prison in 1979 and spent the next 10 years battling

personal demons. Chronically unemployed, he returned to a life of crime. He got

married. He got divorced. He became a drug addict and took up with a violent

motorcycle gang back home in Maryland. When his mother died in 1986, Pete had a

complete breakdown and began the process of psychotherapy and hormone

treatments, with the aim of undergoing sexual reassignment surgery. (He failed to go

through with it.) In 1992, he visited the Aryan Nations headquarters in Coeur

d’Alene, Idaho, where he met former members of the Order and the Pennsylvania

preacher Mark Thomas. By the time he left Aryan Nations, Pete had become an

ordained minister of the Christian Identity Church and an Aryan warrior armed to

the teeth.

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As his militarized masculinity intensified, so did his sexual identity problems.

Privately, following his visit to Aryan Nations, Pete began spending time dressed as

a woman. ‘I went from one extreme to another,’ he said. ‘The radical politics and

macho behavior were just overcompensation for when I was ashamed of how I felt.’

Around this time, Langan read two books that would ultimately serve as the basis for

the group that would become the Aryan Republican Army. The first was The Silent

Brotherhood (the same story of the Order that Thomas would give to Stedeford) and

it would serve as the ideological blueprint for the gang. The second was Richard

Kelly Hoskins’s Vigilantes of Christendom: The History of the Phineas Priesthood

and it would serve as the gang’s spiritual guide. With this, Pete came to believe that

violence, assassination and robbery are biblically and historically justified when

employed to restore God’s law. He was especially taken by Hoskins’ writing on

Jesse James, described as ‘a savior’.

Soon after digesting these works, Langan began his revolution (Hamm 2004, p.334-

5). .

Hamms’ argument here is that culture is important in understanding the workings of

terrorist subcultures such as the ARA, in so far as it represents an assemblage of

ideology, cultural artefacts, language and other forms of group bonding. Cultural

criminology as an approach offers much to assist an understanding and a

demystification of terrorism.

Thinking about crime What role did personal biography, ideology and subculture play in the conversion of Langan to terrorist acts? In what ways do you think the narrative here is suggestive of Katz’s idea of ‘righteous slaughter’ we examined at the start of this chapter?

39

Conclusion

This chapter has explored the perspective of cultural criminology, a relative newcomer to

the discipline of criminology but one that nevertheless plays upon important theoretical

antecedents; specifically the labelling and critical criminological perspectives. However,

its approach is somewhat distinct in that one the one hand, following Katz, it highlights

the importance of emotion and affect in the crime, deviant or transgressive act, and on the

other, situates itself in the social and cultural context of ‘late modernity’ which is viewed

as creating specific criminogenic conditions. There have been emergent criticisms of

cultural criminology, most pointing in different ways to its methodological, theoretical,

political and morally ambiguous stance. As a new criminological perspective, however, it

is arguably yet to define itself and engage in the range of diverse and ‘risky’ research that

would establish its claim as a dominant influence on thinking about crime.

FURTHER READING

An engaging and accessible introduction to cultural criminology can be found in

Ferrell, J., Hayward, K. and Young, J. (2008). Cultural criminology: an invitation.

London. Sage. An exciting engagement with a new way of thinking about crime can

be found with Jack Katz; in particular, his book Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of

crime: moral and sensual attractions in doing evil. New York. Basic Books Inc.

Pubs., while some interesting discussions about research and ethnography can be

found on his website at UCLA, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/katz/

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