ABSTRACT
In the current era, much, if not all, of the world was (and probably still is) experiencing numerous economic, social, and political crises. For example, 400,000 jobs were lost in Canada since the fall of 2008, and in September 2009 Diane Finley, federal Human Resources Minister, argued strongly against cutting the minimum work requirements to qualify for employment insurance (Whittington, 2009a).1 The summer of 2009 was, to say the least, also depressing for many Canadian youths aged 18-24. Approximately one out of every four Canadians in this age group was unemployed; with a sizeable portion unable to pay university
or college tuition in the fall (Galt, 2009). Simultaneously, the youth unemployment rate in the United States hit a record high of 18.5 percent (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009). The North American unemployment situation is not likely to improve in the near future. As Canadian Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page noted in July 2009, Canada could lose 1.2 million jobs in 2009 and 2010. He also predicted that the federal budget deficit over five years will reach C$155.9 billion (Whittington, 2009b). With such high rates of unemployment comes chronic poverty, which in turn spawns more predatory violent street crimes, illegal drug use and dealing, and a myriad of other injurious symptoms of “turbo-charged capitalism” in poor communities (DeKeseredy, Alvi, Schwartz, and Tomaszewski, 2003; Luttwak, 1995). As paid work in advanced capitalist countries and elsewhere rapidly disappears, we still witness many highly injurious effects of patriarchal gender relations. For instance, the World Health Organization conducted a multi-country study of the health effects of domestic violence. Over 24,000 women who resided in urban and rural parts of 10 countries were interviewed: the research team discovered that the percentage of women who were ever physically or sexually assaulted (or both) by an intimate partner ranged from 15 percent to 71 percent, with most research sites ranging between 29 percent and 62 percent (Garcia-Moreno, Jansen, Ellsberg, Heise, and Watts, 2005). Another major international study – the International Violence Against Women Survey (IVAWS) – conducted interviews with 23,000 women in 11 countries. The percentage of women who revealed at least one incident of physical or sexual violence by any man since the age of 16 ranged from 20 percent in Hong Kong to between 50 percent and 60 percent in Australia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and Mozambique. In most countries examined, rates of victimization were above 35 percent (Johnson, Ollus, and Nevala, 2008). Consider, too, that in Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa, and the United States, 40-70 percent of female homicide victims were murdered by their current or former partners (DeKeseredy, in press a; Krug, Dahlberg, and Mercy et al., 2002). Another frightening fact is that 14
girls and women are killed each day in Mexico (Mujica and Ayala, 2008). Of course, male violence against female intimates takes many other shapes and forms, such as honor killings, dowry-related violence, and acid burning (Sev’er, 2008; Silvestri and Crowther-Dowey, 2008; Watts and Zimmerman, 2002). Annually, approximately 5,000 women and girls lose their lives to honor killings around the world (Proudfoot, 2009). Racism, in its many shapes and forms, is also very much alive and well throughout the world despite major legislative changes and the ongoing efforts of human-rights groups and activists. In the United States, for example, 23 percent of Native Americans live below the poverty line, compared to 12 percent of the general population. To make matters worse, the poverty rate on US Native reservations is over 50 percent (Housing Assistance Council, 2002; Perry, 2009a). And, as TurpinPetrosino (2009, p. 21) reminds us, in the United States, “[s]ome of the most notorious hate crimes ever committed have targeted blacks.” Black US males are also incarcerated at a per capita rate six times higher than their white counterparts. Further, about 11 percent of black men aged 30-34 are incarcerated (Human Rights Watch, 2008). What is to be done about unemployment, violence against women, racism, and a host of other problems that plague countries characterized by structured social inequality? Guided by the views of the late University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman (1962),2 many people on the right, like former US President George W. Bush, contend that the solutions to the world’s problems are found in the following trinity: the elimination of the public sector; total corporate liberation; and skeletal social spending (N. Klein, 2007). Ironically, many conservatives do not seem to have a problem spending taxpayers’ money on building more prisons and incarcerating more people. For example, California is home to the largest prison system in the United States, and this state’s corrections budget was $2.1 billion annually at the end of the 1980s. In 2008-2009, California’s corrections budget rose to $10.1 billion (Legislative Analyst’s Office, 2010). Correction facilities now constitute a major industry in the United States and United Kingdom. There is a rapid growth in
private prisons and many stock analysts are encouraging their clients to invest in major companies operating facilities such as the GEO Group, formally known as Wackenhut Securities (Reiman and Leighton, 2010). Private companies claim to run prisons at 10-20 percent lower cost than US state governments, but Austin and Coventry’s (2001) study – sponsored by the National Institute of Justice – found it was only 1 percent. If there is a military-industrial complex that profits from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is also a “prison-industrial complex” that gains from crime at the taxpayers’ expense (Schlosser, 1998). Thus, it is more than fair to assume that big business has a vested interest in ensuring that crime rates stay high and that the incarceration rate – like profits – constantly grows (Selman and Leighton, 2010). As Reiman and Leighton (2010) note:
Not all conservatives view prisons or other elements of the criminal justice system as the primary cures for crime. One recent example is Canadian psychologist Donald Dutton (2006), who prefers “treating” wife-beaters to mandatory arrest policies. Like prisons, psychotherapy, counseling, psychosurgery, or any of a number of other techniques designed to help offenders identify and deal with their problems contribute little, if anything, to lowering crime rates. Such strategies suffer from what Elliott Currie (1985) calls the “fallacy of autonomy.” The idea of autonomy is that people act on their own, without the influence of others. The implication of theories that inform individual treatment is that peer groups and broader social forces have little impact on people’s behaviors, attitudes, norms, and values (DeKeseredy and Schwartz, 1996). Those who break the law are seen as living in a
“world strangely devoid of social or economic consequences, even of history” (Currie, 1985, p. 215). This is true of some offenders. However, most violent street crimes, especially those committed by youths, are committed in groups (Warr, 2002). This is why incarcerating or “treating” several gang members does nothing to lower the rate of violent crime in the United States (Currie, 2008a). You can lock people up or make them undergo therapy, but such measures do not eliminate the social, psychological, or interpersonal forces that influence people to harm others. For every gang member you take off the street, others will replace him or her. If people’s peers motivate them to commit violent acts, the same can be said about broader structural forces. It is, for example, not surprising that the violent crime rate in the United States is higher than that of most other highly industrialized societies (Currie, 2008a; Van Dijk, 2008). It is well known that the United States is a nation characterized by gross economic inequality, poverty, high infant mortality rates, homelessness, and inadequate social support services (for example, unemployment insurance and health care) (Schwartz and DeKeseredy, 2008). High rates of violent acts are major symptoms of these problems (DeKeseredy et al., 2003), and these crimes are committed mainly by groups of “underclass” people, sometimes referred to as “the truly disadvantaged” (Blau and Blau, 1982; Wilson, 1987). In fact, social and economic inequality – not personality or biological factors – are the most powerful predictors of most violent crimes (DeKeseredy, in press a). Are there useful and meaningful alternatives to conventional wisdom about crime and its control? In other words, is there a progressive school of thought that sees crime as something other than a property of the individual and that views broader social, political, and economic change as the best solution to crimes in the streets, suites, and domestic/intimate settings? Anyone familiar with social scientific empirical, theoretical, and policy work would quickly point out that sociologists provide different ways of thinking about crime, deviance, and social control. Indeed, they do and some of them have had an important impact on public policy over the past 50 years. Consider
strain theorists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960). Their differential opportunity theory of delinquent subcultures was extremely important in the history of criminological and deviance theory, in that perhaps no other theory was responsible for generating so much government funding in the United States (DeKeseredy, Ellis, and Alvi, 2005). The logic was that if gang membership was a function of a lack of legitimate opportunity structures for youths, then the solution was to increase these opportunities. Under President Kennedy, and especially under President Johnson with his “War on Poverty” in the 1960s, a wide variety of programs were instituted to deal with educational deficiencies and job training. Unfortunately, under what Curran and Renzetti (2001) call the late President Reagan’s “War on the Poor” in the 1980s, those programs not earlier eliminated by President Nixon were killed off, and today, there is still considerable resistance in the United States to implementing policies guided by Cloward and Ohlin, and others with similar perspectives on social problems. Most sociologists who study crime, though, are what some criminologists would refer to as “liberal progressives.” In other words, they: accept official definitions of crime (e.g., legal definitions); ignore concepts and theories offered by Marxist, feminist, critical race, and other “radical” scholars; call for fine-tuning state institutions’ responses to social problems (e.g., expand the role of the welfare state); pay little – if any – attention to the role of broader social forces, and primarily use quantitative methods to collect and analyze crime and criminal justice data (Ratner, 1985). Metaphorically speaking, critical criminologists, on the other hand, throw bricks through establishment or mainstream criminology’s windows (Young, 1998). “[R]esolutely sociological in orientation” (Carrington and Hogg, 2008, p. 5), critical criminologists oppose official definitions of crime, official statistics (e.g., police arrest data), and positivism, but are for social justice, human rights, and the like (Stubbs, 2008). Positivism assumes that human behavior is determined and can be measured (Curran and Renzetti, 2001). Moreover, within the discipline of criminology, there is “an enduring commitment to measurement” (Hagan, 1985, p. 78).
