The Invention of Crime and Deviance

1
The Invention of Crime and Deviance
2
Historical Origins of criminology study of
devianceCriminology (Law) Deviance
(Sociology)See Colin Sumner The social nature
of crime deviance in The Blackwell Companion
to Criminology (2004) esp pp 1-9
www.blackwellpublishing.com

• See also David Garland Of Crime and Criminals
  The Development of Criminology in Britain in The
  Oxford Handbook of Criminology (1994)
• Sharpe, J Crime, Order Historical Change in
  Muncie, J McLaughlin (1996) The Problem of
  Crime

3
Crime and Deviance as relative to time

• Studying the history of crime and punishment
  reminds us that our current ways of thinking
  about and dealing with these problems are not the
  only ones that human beings have found
  appropriate
• J. Sharpe

4
Early conceptions of crime

• are related to sinfulness and morality and are
  more concerned with local issues of disorder and
  immorality.
• They are Spiritual Explanations (Vold
  Bernard)
• Persons possessed by evil forces or bewitched by
  black magic or seduced by sorcery or demented by
  demons or earmarked by God
• Box (1971) p2

5
Garland

• Christianitydid not separate out the law
  breaker as different or abnormal, but instead
  understood him or her as merely a manifestation
  of universal depravity and the fallen sinful
  state of mankindInthe explicitly moral and
  spiritual terms in which the Christian tradition
  discusses individual wrongdoing, the lack of
  evidence, the invocation of the devil, or demons,
  or divine intervention to account for human
  action, and the appeal to scriptural authority as
  proof for propositions are all starkly
  contrastive reminders of the rather different
  rules governing modern criminological discourse
• Garland 199429)

6
Modern thinking about crime

• is closely related to what Vold Bernard (2002)
  call Natural Explanations and is concerned with
  a public debate about law order, the criminal
  and state control.
• Garland rejects the idea of an unbroken concern
  with crime the criminal which stretches back
  to the dawn of time. Instead a new discourse
  emerged in 18th 19th centuries which evolved
  into the specific study of crime and the
  criminal. This grew out of 2 separate concerns
• i) the government project the admin of
  justice
• ii) the Lombrosian project the search for
  cause of individual offending.
• In the USA there was a broader concern with anti
  social behaviour which is the study of Deviance.

7
'Crime as a social problem'

• Victorian observers would have been struck by
  their forefathers relative indifference to crime
  as a problem, and by their relative
  satisfaction with the apparently arbitrary and
  capricious mechanisms which contained it.
• This was not because crime was infrequent then
  it is not at all clear that there was less
  thieving and violence per capita in
  eighteenth-century cities than in nineteenth. But
  crime did not ,as yet appear to threaten
• hierarchy, and the terms in which crime might be
  debated as a 'problem were not yet formed.
  Historians of early modern crime must realize not
  only that 'their subject was not known then by
  that name' but that as a
• subject it did not exist. The word 'crime' when
  used at all before the 1780s, usually referred to
  a personal depravity. It lacked the problematic
  and aggregative resonance it was soon to acquire.
  Despite occasional
• panics about the ubiquity of thieving, crime in
  aggregate was not yet thought to be increasing as
  a necessary and potentially uncontrollable effect
  of social change. Similarly, the criminal' was
  not yet discerned as a
• social archetype, symbolic of the nation's
  collective ill-health ...

8
So that by the 19thC

• By the time Peel took up the challenge of penal,
  police and law reform in the 1820s, the political
  and cultural climate was quite transformed. Crime
  was fast becoming 'important'. In the post-war
  world, and on into the 1840s, the subject came to
  be cemented into an ideology about the Condition
  of England. Crime was becoming a vehicle for
  articulating mounting anxieties about issues
  which really had nothing to do with crime at all
  social change and the stability of social
  hierarchy. These issues invested crime with new
  meanings, justified vastly accelerated action
  against it, and have determined attitudes to it
  ever since.
• (Gatrell, quoted in Sharpe p137)

9
The modern concept of crime and the development
of criminology relate to several factors

• 1. The Enlightenment
• 2. Private property
• 3. The Industrial Revolution and the emergence of
  two classes
• a propertied and educated middle class
• an impoverished working /underclass
• (The Dangerous classes)
• 4. Political Revolution
• in Europe
• disturbances at Home
• 5. Social research Statistical Societies
• social accountants
• social explorers

10
Summary

• The early phase of commercialisation and
  urbanisation had generated the elements needed
  for the later birth of criminology in the
  nineteenth centuryThese elements included the
  fear of urban crime and disease, political
  instability, the rise of the Protestant work
  ethic, a militaristic approach to public order,
  the ascendancy of the new rationalist or
  natural sciences in both technology and the
  study of human behaviour, and a growing awareness
  of the close relationship between moral health,
  political order and a prosperous economy
• (Sumner 20045)

11
In the 20th Century

• Major factors which establish the interactive
  sociological standpoint as the fundamental
  assumptionfor any rational or scientific study
  of crime and deviance
• Urbanisation and migration new waves of
  widespread petty delinquency and organised
  crime(1920s)
• Growth of multinationals make a mockery of the
  claim of equality under the law.
• Widespread poverty.
• W. War 2 mass killing (of civilians), genocide
  (Nazi Germany), War Trials.
• Post war reconstruction welfare planning out
  the roots of deviance, degeneracy and dissent
• 1950s - 70s Sub cultures of deviance /
  delinquency (bad company and bad behaviour) in
  the West.
• War on terror the social value of violence
  in the suppression of nationalist and other
  groups.
• The revolution in manners and morals in the
  1920s and the cultural revolution in 1960s
  challenge to conservative values.

12
20th Century continued

• Rise of feminism challenge to the natural
  order founded on male violence.
• Post 1945 growth in affluence and massive rise
  in volume crime continues.
• Rise of political dissidence in East West
  challenges state power / consensus.
• Rise of huge regional economic / power blocs
  decline of nation state who rules whose norms
  define crime?
• Changes in travel, labour, migration etc further
  undermines local / national ideas of morality
  law as cultural diversity blurs the distinctions
  over right wrong etc.
• Environmental destruction as result of
  unregulated expansion of capitalist economies
  (and communist ones).
• (Sumner 20048-9)

13
The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of the Sociology of
Deviance

• Warfare over the terrain of the sociology of
  deviance is actually due to the fact that the
  combatants over the years, in their enthusiasm
  for the fight, have completely demolished the
  terrain...the terrain now resembles the Somme in
  1918. It is barren, fruitless, full of empty
  trenches and craters, littered with unexploded
  mines and eerily silent. No one fights for
  hegemony over a dangerous graveyard. It is now
  time to drop arms and show respect for the dead".
• The Sociology of Deviance an Obituary, Colin
  Sumner

14
Goode Hendershott disagree

• Researchers of deviance have taken note of this
  claim (that deviance is dead), smiled, and
  continued about their business studying and
  writing about the most fascinating subject known
  to humanity social disapproval and the
  activities and conditions that generate that
  disapproval. No one actually believes that the
  sociology of deviance has died, but in some
  intellectual circles it is a fashionable parlour
  game to pretend that it has Goode (20014)
• Despite this shift in what is now seen as the
  politics of deviance, there are signs that
  deviant behavior is beginning to be rediscovered
  and redefined by ordinary people who suffered the
  real-world consequences of the academic elites
  rejection of deviance beginning in the 60s.
  Those whose communities have been broken by
  failed welfare policies, or whose families have
  fallen apart as a result of teenage pregnancy or
  divorce, are now speaking out about the moral
  chaos that is destroying their neighborhoods,
  their schools, and their families. The pendulum
  continues to swing where it will stop is not
  clear. Hendershott.