MA criminal Justice Class and Crime

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MA criminal Justice Class and Crime

• Mike Kilroe
• October 2008

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Outline of Session

• Thinking about bias in the CJS!
• Social Class!
• Crime and Inequality
• Social Class and Offending
• Dangerous Places and Dangerous Groups
• The Underclass Perspectives and Explanations
• DVD - Underclass and Crime

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Social Class/Crime and Inequality

• Social Class A problem of definition
• During the past 3 decades inequality (in UK) has
  grown more rapidly than in any other
  industrialised nation (Hale 2005)
• Rapid growth in numbers living in low-income
  families with children
• 1 in 5 children in Britain are growing up in
  workless households (Gregg et al 2004)
• Research historically suggests link between crime
  and unemployment

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Social Class/ Social Class and Offending

• Research on convicted offenders suggests that the
  majority come from lower class and economically
  deprived backgrounds (Coleman and Moynihan 2003)
• This links to the notion of Dangerous groups and
  Dangerous places (Muncie Mclaughlin 2000)

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• The Historical Dimensions
• Pearson(1983) the scum and dregs of society
• Poor Law Commission (1834) flotsam jetsam of
  industrial life deserving undeserving
  poor.
• The Jukes (Richard L Dugdale 1877 USA)
  degenerate families a history of pauperism,
  prostitution, exhaustion, disease, fornication,
  and Ilegitimacy
• Karl Marx the Lumpenproletariat as the
  residue of society scum of the deprived
  elements

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Graham Clark Dangerous places 1996

• The city as a dangerous place
• The poor as the great unwashed versus
  respectable society
• or as nomads versus civilised man
• Henry Mayhew 1861
• Will work
• Cant work
• Wont work

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UNDERCLASS

• The term was first used to refer to the black
  townships of SA and Ghettos of US in the
  1960s/1970s
• Then by Rex in Britain to explain the persistence
  of racial and social groups at the bottom of
  social hierarchy.
• Also considered by the following writers (amongst
  others)
• Dahrendorf
• Pahl
• Hall
• Lord Harris of Highcross
• Charles Murray
• Frank Field
• Bea Campbell
• Dennis Erdos
• Ian Duncan Smith Breakdown Britain (2006)

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DAHRENDORF (WEBERIAN)

• Underclass 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

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Characterised by

• - Isolation
• - Marginalisation
• - Fragmentation
• - Exclusion
• - Defeatism (apathy)
• - Delinquency
• - Dependency (welfarism)
• Consequences
• - Threat to social order
• - Over policing
• - A threat to citizenship

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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 )

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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)

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Charles MurrayThe American Enterprise Institute

• The Underclass- The cultural model
• Key Features
• The decline of the family
• Illegitimacy- the absence of fathers
• Attitudes to work/marriage/childrearing
• Dirty homes
• Drop out from labour force
• Welfare dependent
• Lack of education
• Anti-social behaviour/Criminal activity
• A parasitic group feeding on the rest of
  society
• Their values contaminate the life of entire
  neighbourhoods
• Citizens and outlaws
• Outlaws habitual offenders (Simple Justice
  2005)
• Criminal Justice System gone soft on outlaws

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Bruce Anderson the new 'Dickensian underclass'

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

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Dennis Erdos Cultures and Crimes Policing in
Four Nations(2005)

• In this work they concentrate on the Cultural
  drivers of crime and compare the policing of
  UK/France/Germany/USA
• 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.

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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

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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 )

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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 Merton 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

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Breakdown Britain 2006Report into social
breakdown/poverty

• 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

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The Underclass and the Criminal Justice System

• Ethnic time bomb in our jails. Criminal Justice
  is racially biased-Guardian 25/07/2001
• Britain is creating an underclass excluded from
  jobs and education
• Black and ethnic suspects tend to be
  overcharged taken to court/processed
• Ethnic minorities account for more than 20 of
  prisoners
• Highest since records began
• Harry Fletcher- National Association of Probation
  officers The ethnic proportion of the prison
  population has gone up and up under Labour, and
  is a shameful reflection of the institutional
  racism in the whole system

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The Underclass and the Criminal justice System

• Home Office (March) 2006
• Black people continue to be over-represented at
  every level of the criminal justice system
• 6 times more likely to be stopped and searched by
  police than white people
• Three times more likely to be arrested
• Prison population of 24
• Asian twice more likely to be stopped than white
  people
• Deaths in police custody rising (106 In 2005)
• Not simply the result of ethnic minority people
  committing a disproportionate number of crimes

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The Underclass and the Criminal Justice System

• Search and Destroy Jerome G Miller 1997
• A disproportionate number of African American
  males in US prison population
• African American male between the ages of 18-35
  has inordinate likelihood of encountering CJS
• Bias among police/probation/courts/social
  scientists
• Society/State using criminal justice system as a
  means of social control of an underclass

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Next week

• White Collar Crime
• White Collar Crime and the Criminal Justice
  System
• One law for the rich?/ A question of Class?
• The role of regulatory bodies
• Week after
• Case studies Evaluation/was justice done?

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Hatfield