The Underclass

1
The Underclass Crime

• Mike Keating
• 2008

2
The Underclass - definition

• The term underclass does not connote moral or
  ethical unworthiness, nor does it have any other
  pejorative meaning it simply describes a
  relatively new population in modern society...
  (those) who have never moved from the level of
  bare subsistence living are essentially part of
  the underclass
• (D Glasgow, Quoted in ODonnell, p316)

3
The poor as deserving of charity

• The poor always shall ye have with you (St
  John8)
• If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou
  hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have
  treasure in heaven St Matthew21)

4
The poor as a burden

• Pearson the scum and dregs of society
• Poor Law Commission flotsam jetsam of
  industrial life deserving undeserving
  poor.
• The Jukes degenerate families a history of
  pauperism, prostitution, exhaustion, disease,
  fornication, and Ilegitimacy
• Marx the lumpen proletariat as the residue
  of society venal tools of reaction

5
Chesneys Victorian Underworld

• The undeserving poor
• Human debris
• the social sump
• the dangerous classes mummering in their
  horrible hives

6
Graham Clark Dangerous places

• The city as a dangerous place
• The poor as the great unwashed versus
  respectable society
• or as nomads versus civilised man
• Mayhew (1951)

7
The City 5 threats 3 symbols

• 5 Threats
• Threat to public health
• Threat to public order
• Threat to moral order
• Threat to law order
• Threat to economic order
• 3 symbols
• Dangerous places
• Dangerous people
• Dangerous sexualities

8
20th Century

• The term was first used to refer to the black
  townships of ZA and Ghettos of US
• Then by Rex in Britain to explain the persistence
  of racial and social groups at the bottom of
  social hierarchy.
• Dahrendorf
• Pahl
• Hall
• Lord Harris of Highcross
• Charles Murray
• Bea Campbell
• Dennis Erdos
• Ian Duncan Smith Breakdown Britain

9
DAHRENDORF (WEBERIAN)

• Underclass descriptive term
• Refers to
• - inner-city
• - minority groups
• - relative deprivation
• - persistent unemployment
• - cycle of exclusion
• A group of people who are redundant to and
  have no stake in the system

10
Characterised by

• - isolation
• - marginalisation
• - fragmentation
• - exclusion
• - defeatism (apathy)
• - delinquency
• - dependency (welfarism)
• Consequences
• - threat to social order
• - overpolicing
• - threat to citizenship
• Solution
• - basic minimum wage
• - self-activity

11
PAHL (PESSIMIST)

• Underclass become the losers in an achievement
  based society
• Underclass unrepresented politically
• Underclass excluded from opportunity structure
• Fear of underclass by respectable society
• BUT
• (i) Origins are specifically related to race and
  stratification theory (in U.S.)
• Not transferrable
• (ii) In Britain the poor are a transient group
  therefore it is misleading to suggest that they
  are a permanent and conscious underclass.

12
HALL (MARXIST)

• The term may be used at a descriptive level to
  refer to a semi-permanent group of
  multi-disadvantaged people at bottom of the
• BUT
• This class are not permanent
• Not fragmented from working class i.e. misleading
  to represent as underclass v respectable.
• Underclass needs to be placed in context of a
  range of processes which are part of the
  systematic exclusion of working class people
  from the opportunity structure.
• Underclass those who are at the bottom of a
  variety of ladders.
• Underclass may be seen as part of reserve army
  of labour whose class position is determined by
  the opportunity structure of society.
• Absence of real opportunity welfare
  dependency/crime
• Policing the Crisis underclass riots law
  and order issue

13
Lord Harris of Highcross (Free Market Tory)

• Rejects underclass as sociological claptrap (the
  jargon of defeat).
• (i) Nothing new- the poor as eternal burden
• c/f Mayhew, Booth.
• (ii) Secondary poverty as key
• - family
• - education
• - habits
• failure to become socially mobile
• (iii) Sociological categorisation/determinism
• dehumanisation of the individual
• (iv) Self-help individualism as solution.

14
Charles Murray The Emerging British Underclass

• During the last half of the 1960s and throughout
  the 1970s something strange and frightening was
  happening among the poor people in the United
  States. Poor communities that had consisted
  mostly of hardworking folks began deteriorating,
  sometimes falling apart altogether. Drugs,
  crime, illegitimacy, homelessness, dropout from
  the job market, drop out from school, casual
  violence - all the measures that were available
  to the social scientists showed large increases
  focused in poor communities. As the 1980s began,
  the growing population of 'the other kind of poor
  people could no longer be ignored, and a label
  for them came into use. In the US we began to
  call them the underclass.
• (Murray 19902-3 )

15
Charles Murray

• Britain has a growing population of work-aged,
  healthy people who live in a different world from
  other Britons, who are raising their children to
  live in it, and whose values are now
  contaminating society
• (Murray in Sunday Times 26/11/89)

16
Bruce Anderson the new 'Dickensian underclass'

• 'We are in the grip of the postmodern vagabond
  We have expensively constructed slums full of
  layabouts and sluts whose progeny are two-legged
  beasts . . . We cannot cure this by family,
  religion and self-help. So we will have to rely
  on repression.' He concludes that 'this need not
  mean hanging, or even flogging'. Instead, he
  advocates that the 'apprentice criminals' parents
  need to be treated as toads under the harrow
• .
• The Spectator (August 96),

17
Dennis Erdos(1993)

• Sociologists who are often regarded as
  culturalists.
• In Families without Fatherhood and
• Crime the Dismembered Family they seem to be
  siding with Murray argue that men are losing
  their traditional roles as breadwinners and
  fathers and have abandoned their responsibilities
  to kids (especially their sons).

18
Cultures and Crimes Policing in Four
Nations(2005)

• In this work they concentrate on the Cultural
  drivers of crime
• However much we might try to improve policing,
  the real problem is the loss of internalised
  moral principles that prevent people from
  committing crimes in the first place.
• The rise in lawlessness reflects a decline in
  shared values, thanks to the cultural revolution
  of the 1960s, which subverted many institutions
  through which moral capital was generated - in
  particular, the family based on marriage.

19
Young people who grow up in troubled and
dysfunctional households in which moral values
are not inculcated, who attend schools where
teachers are afraid or unwilling to teach the
difference between right or wrong, who live in
communities in which the influence of religious
faith is negligible, will naturally be drawn
towards the self-gratification and situational
ethics that predominate in contemporary culture.

• 'A society on a large scale or a small scale
  ceases to exist when its members lose the
  capacity to agree on what facts are true and what
  conduct is good'.
• Policing becomes impossible

20
Bea Campbell

• Underclass is a loaded term
• Insults the poor
• Blames the victim (of Govt policy)
• Powerful ideological weapon in times of moral
  panic
• it carries a class contempt that is a classic
  variant of the contempt for what were regarded as
  lesser peoples...( it gives ) a sense of
  something other, dirty, lesser, lower, dark,
  mysterious, impenetrable. In other words ...a
  picture of the primitive.
• (Speech to New Spirit, New Communities
  conference, Edinburgh, 1993 )

21
The underlying causes of social and economic
decline are overlooked

• The real causes of decline are to be found in
  the state of economic emergency which destroys
  neighbourhoods and communities
• People forced into crime in order to survive in
  consumer culture (see also strain theory)
• Plus increasing opportunities for crime and the
  ease with which it can be accomplished i.e. easy
  access to movable objects which have a value and
  added currency in this illicit market.
• Exacerbated by
• criminal, hierarchical and militaristic networks
  which develop characterised by their own
  standards and rules which are almost exclusively
  connected to masculinised cultures

22
Criminal sub-cultures thrive in conditions of
structural poverty

• They are criminalised cultures which enforce
  their order through coercion which draws on forms
  of brutality and brutalism which celebrate their
  masculinity...one of the most important things
  about those criminalised networks is that theyre
  not just about survival crime, theyre about a
  mode of constituting masculinity for men. Its
  one of things which produces them as men...
  These are lads that are very interested in power,
  their own power, to overwhelm the neighbourhoods
  they live in, to take control of the streets, to
  be visible, to inhabit, occupy and control all
  the space that they have access to
• See also Jock Young et al alienation and
  relative deprivation as key factors in parasitic
  cultures of crime

23
Dave Smiths Review of the Underclass debate

• Representations of the underclass
• Emotive
• Moral aspect
• Economic / Social
• Problems with definition and objectivity but seen
  as a downward spiralling, residual group without
  a stable relationship to the main economic and
  social order (Wilson)
• Images of deserving and undeserving poor
  reemerge.
• Culturalists
• See Murray, Dennis, Erdos, Anderson
• V
• Structuralists
• Westergaard, Smith, Field, Hall, Campbell

24
Some kind of synthesis

• Smith notes the attempt by Dahrendorf to bridge
  the two by arguing that society creates an
  underclass but it reproduces itself through a
  culture which attacks mainstream values / social
  order.
• See also Heaths survey which rejects the idea
  that the underclass have different attitudes to
  family, work, politics, morality.....
• In Kinseys work (1993) similar conclusions drawn
  from study of youngsters in Scotland and the
  criminality of the underclass is challenged.
• (David Smith Understanding the Underclass 1992)

25
Underclass 10 Years on

• Its about behaviour that has created a
  lifestyle which is permanently dislocated from
  the habits and way of life of the majority. And
  at its very heart is the disintegration of the
  family with high rates of lone parenthood and
  teenage pregnancy and whole communities where
  committed fathers are unknown. These lives are
  often simply chaotic. The most alarming thing if
  you visit such areas is to see children who
  arent socialised so they cant even use a knife
  and fork they dont know what an alarm clock is
  because they have no sense of an ordered day
  primary school children who have no idea how to
  make social relationships but who are aggressive,
  foul-mouthed or withdrawn.
• Melanie Phillips (200119)
• Civitas website

26
New Labour

• Having "two caring, loving parents" gives
  children a greater prospect of "making the most
  of their lives
• John Hutton
• (September2006)

27
Breakdown Britain

• 70 of young offenders come from broken homes
• Majority have addiction problems and low levels
  of education
• Many brought up in violent dysfunctional
  families where marriage has disappeared
• As alternative to stable families they seek
  identity and protection on the streets from local
  gang membership
• Solution to support marriage keep families
  together
• (December 2006)

28
The Jeremy Kyle Generation?

• "In too many places, in too many communities, we
  have a Jeremy Kyle generation of young men
  reaching adult life ill-equipped for it.
• Lacking the right social skills. Lacking a sense
  of purpose and responsibility. Lacking
  self-confidence. Lacking the ability to seize on
  an opportunity and make the most of it. and as a
  result turning against the society in which they
  live.
• Chris Grayling 11/2/08