ABSTRACT
0001–8721–7066
It is best to read this chapter as an extended argument for the revitalization of a sociological criminology of street crime and violence based on synthesizing the intellectual resources of realist criminology and those of process sociology. The most brutal and brutalizing aspect of contemporary street crime—weaponized violence between some members of the poorest and marginalized young men—has lacked rigorous and cumulative sociological analysis in contemporary British criminology (though less so in American criminology). This chapter aims to make a modest contribution to the regeneration of a dynamic sociological criminology of violent street cultures. Firstly, I revisit the key empirical, methodological and conceptual claims of the left realist research programme of the 1980s and 1990s on street crime and violence. Attention is paid initially to its ‘grand narrative’ theorization of the relationship of macro trends in capitalist modernity to the changing nature of street crime and violence. The discussion then turns realist criminology’s conjunctural explanation of the late twentieth century, ‘late modern’ emergence of violent and destructive subcultural adaptations among ‘angry young men’ in the poorest and most marginalized sections of this ‘exclusive society’. The lasting contribution of realist criminology is then assessed and synthesized with figurational theorizing on the brutalizing and decivilizing processes in urban zones of ‘advanced marginality’. Secondly, realist criminology’s fine-grained, empirical analysis of causes of street crime and violence is recovered for contemporary criminological practice. Drawing on the heuristic device of the ‘realist square of crime’, a figurational-sociological account of the interdependent actions and reactions of the four corners of the square of street crime and weaponized violence among young men is developed (i.e. the inter-dependent figuration of offenders, victims, communities, and state agencies of control). This account will aim to address the key interactional dynamics of this ‘quadrilateral of causal forces’ (Downes et al., 2016: 296). In attempting to answer this question, the discussion draws heavily on an appraisal of the limited existing body of empirical sociological research in British criminology in the last two decades, as well as on an elaboration of new avenues for figurational research-theorizing.
